Problem running Tensorflow Transformer Tutorial - tensorflow

Question

I was checking the TensorFlow tutorial "Transformer model for language understanding," and I copied the code exactly as it is into my Spyder 4 environment. However, the code shows the following error when running:
AttributeError: 'RepeatedCompositeFieldContainer' object has no attribute 'append'
I checked the code and realized that the error comes from the call function of the MultiHeadAttention class. However, I do not understand what the problem is since the code runs just fine in the Colab notebook.
class MultiHeadAttention(tf.keras.layers.Layer):
def __init__(self, d_model, num_heads):
super(MultiHeadAttention, self).__init__()
self.num_heads = num_heads
self.d_model = d_model
assert d_model % self.num_heads == 0
self.depth = d_model // self.num_heads
self.wq = tf.keras.layers.Dense(d_model)
self.wk = tf.keras.layers.Dense(d_model)
self.wv = tf.keras.layers.Dense(d_model)
self.dense = tf.keras.layers.Dense(d_model)
def split_heads(self, x, batch_size):
"""Split the last dimension into (num_heads, depth).
Transpose the result such that the shape is (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len, depth)
"""
x = tf.reshape(x, (batch_size, -1, self.num_heads, self.depth))
return tf.transpose(x, perm=[0, 2, 1, 3])
def call(self, v, k, q, mask):
batch_size = tf.shape(q)[0]
q = self.wq(q) # (batch_size, seq_len, d_model)
k = self.wk(k) # (batch_size, seq_len, d_model)
v = self.wv(v) # (batch_size, seq_len, d_model)
q = self.split_heads(q, batch_size) # (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len_q, depth)
k = self.split_heads(k, batch_size) # (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len_k, depth)
v = self.split_heads(v, batch_size) # (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len_v, depth)
# scaled_attention.shape == (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len_q, depth)
# attention_weights.shape == (batch_size, num_heads, seq_len_q, seq_len_k)
scaled_attention, attention_weights = scaled_dot_product_attention(
q, k, v, mask)
scaled_attention = tf.transpose(scaled_attention, perm=[0, 2, 1, 3]) # (batch_size, seq_len_q,
num_heads, depth)
concat_attention = tf.reshape(scaled_attention,
(batch_size, -1, self.d_model)) # (batch_size, seq_len_q, d_model)
output = self.dense(concat_attention) # (batch_size, seq_len_q, d_model)
return output, attention_weights
The error shows when executing the line of q = self.wq(q) in the call function. Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I suspect that the problem is that your protobuf Python package version is too old. It should be >=3.8.0. See the troubleshooting here.
I was seeing the same error message and upgrading protobuf proved to be the solution. In my case there was extra anguish in making sure Python found the upgraded package in the labyrinth of remnants of old Python installations, virtual environments and the PYTHONPATH pointing to an old installation with an old protobuf.