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Vector Database by hand ✍️ ~ 10 steps walkthrough below Vector databases are the backbone of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). How do they actually work? Goal: index three sentences, then answer a query by finding the nearest one, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = A dataset...

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Tom Yeh

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36,074 views • 1 month ago •via X (Twitter)

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X1 month ago

Is it binary

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Jared Traehorn1 month ago

Step 5 is where the real judgment call hides: what the projection matrix keeps and what it throws away decides everything downstream. The dot products in step 9 are just measuring distance in whatever space step 5 chose.

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Cynlic Stephanie1 month ago

This is clear to figure out .

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paker topsion1 month ago

Great post. How to create the data vedio

Michał Piszczek's profile picture
Michał Piszczek1 month ago

clean at 2D and three sentences. at production scale you trade exact dot products for HNSW and eat the recall loss

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CLIP by hand ✍️ ~ 13 steps walkthrough below CLIP, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, is OpenAI's answer to a question that sounds impossible: how do you put a sentence and a picture in the same space? CLIP shipped when OpenAI was still open, and those embeddings were shared far and wide. Almost every multimodal model you use today descends from them. How does it work? Goal: learn one shared embedding space for text and images. = 1. Given = A mini batch of three text-image pairs. OpenAI trained the original on 400 million. = 2. Text to vectors = Let us look up each word with word2vec. = 3. Image to vectors = We cut each image into two patches and flatten them. Now text and pixels are both just numbers. = 4. The other pairs = Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the rest of the batch. = 5. Encode = Let us push both sides through their encoders, a linear layer and a ReLU. In practice these are transformers, but the shape of the operation is the same. = 6. Mean pooling = We average across the columns, so each image and each sentence collapses to a single vector. = 7. Projection = The text vectors are 3D and the image vectors are 4D, so they cannot be compared at all. A linear layer projects both to 2D. That 2D space is the shared embedding space, and getting here is the whole point of the model. = 8. Prepare for matmul = Let us copy the text vectors down and the transposed image vectors across. = 9. MatMul = We multiply, which takes the dot product of every text vector with every image vector. Each cell is one estimate of how well a sentence matches a picture. = 10. Softmax, e to the power = Raise e to each cell. To keep it hand sized we approximate e with 3. = 11. Softmax, sum = Sum each row for image to text, each column for text to image. = 12. Softmax, normalize = Divide, and out come two similarity matrices, one per direction. = 13. Loss gradients = The targets are identity matrices: a pair that belongs together should score 1, every other cell 0. Subtract the target from the similarity and you have the gradients, in both directions. The takeaway: pairing a picture with a sentence comes down to a single dot product. Everything before step 9 is the work of getting them into one shared space, so that the dot product finally means something. 💾 Save this post!
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CLIP by hand ✍️ ~ 13 steps walkthrough below CLIP, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training, is OpenAI's answer to a question that sounds impossible: how do you put a sentence and a picture in the same space? CLIP shipped when OpenAI was still open, and those embeddings were shared far and wide. Almost every multimodal model you use today descends from them. How does it work? Goal: learn one shared embedding space for text and images. = 1. Given = A mini batch of three text-image pairs. OpenAI trained the original on 400 million. = 2. Text to vectors = Let us look up each word with word2vec. = 3. Image to vectors = We cut each image into two patches and flatten them. Now text and pixels are both just numbers. = 4. The other pairs = Repeat steps 2 and 3 for the rest of the batch. = 5. Encode = Let us push both sides through their encoders, a linear layer and a ReLU. In practice these are transformers, but the shape of the operation is the same. = 6. Mean pooling = We average across the columns, so each image and each sentence collapses to a single vector. = 7. Projection = The text vectors are 3D and the image vectors are 4D, so they cannot be compared at all. A linear layer projects both to 2D. That 2D space is the shared embedding space, and getting here is the whole point of the model. = 8. Prepare for matmul = Let us copy the text vectors down and the transposed image vectors across. = 9. MatMul = We multiply, which takes the dot product of every text vector with every image vector. Each cell is one estimate of how well a sentence matches a picture. = 10. Softmax, e to the power = Raise e to each cell. To keep it hand sized we approximate e with 3. = 11. Softmax, sum = Sum each row for image to text, each column for text to image. = 12. Softmax, normalize = Divide, and out come two similarity matrices, one per direction. = 13. Loss gradients = The targets are identity matrices: a pair that belongs together should score 1, every other cell 0. Subtract the target from the similarity and you have the gradients, in both directions. The takeaway: pairing a picture with a sentence comes down to a single dot product. Everything before step 9 is the work of getting them into one shared space, so that the dot product finally means something. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

20,750 views • 1 month ago

Self Attention by hand ✍️ ~ 9 steps walkthrough below Self-attention is what enables LLMs to understand context. How does it work? So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: turn four 6D features into four 3D attention weighted features, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = Four feature vectors, six dimensions each, one per position. = 2. Query, key, value = Let us multiply the features by WQ, WK and WV. Queries, keys and values all come out of the same four features, and that is what the word "self" is doing in self-attention. = 3. Prepare for MatMul = We copy the queries across the top and the transposed keys down the side. Lining the two up is half the work. = 4. MatMul = Let us multiply K transpose by Q. Every cell is the dot product of one key with one query, which we use as a matching score. That works because the dot product is the numerator of cosine similarity: it is how alike two vectors are, before anyone divides by their lengths. = 5. Scale = We divide by the square root of dk, the dimension of a key vector, here 3. Without it the scores grow with the dimension and a 64-wide head would swamp the softmax. To keep the page doable in pen, the drawing approximates dividing by root 3 with halving. = 6. e to the power = Let us raise e to the power of each score. This is the first half of softmax, and the drawing uses 3 in place of e, which is close enough to do in your head. = 7. Sum = We add up each column: 16, 6, 7 and 12. = 8. Normalize = Let us divide every cell by its column sum. That gives the attention weight matrix in yellow, and each of its four columns is now a probability distribution over the four positions. The decimals are nudged as they are rounded, so every column still sums to exactly 1. = 9. MatMul = We multiply the value vectors by those weights. Each output is a blend of all four values, mixed in the proportion the attention matrix just decided, and it goes to the position-wise feed forward network in the next layer: the FFN box at the bottom of the page. The outputs: Attention weights (A), by column = [.2, .6, 0, .2], [.2, .4, .2, .2], [.4, .2, 0, .4], [.1, .7, .1, .1] Attention weighted features (Z) = [8, 2, 6], [8, 4, 4], [16, 4, 2], [4, 2, 7] The takeaway: attention is a weighted average, and everything before step 9 exists to decide the weights. Compare every position with every other, turn the scores into one distribution per position, then blend. 💾 Save this post!
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Self Attention by hand ✍️ ~ 9 steps walkthrough below Self-attention is what enables LLMs to understand context. How does it work? So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: turn four 6D features into four 3D attention weighted features, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = Four feature vectors, six dimensions each, one per position. = 2. Query, key, value = Let us multiply the features by WQ, WK and WV. Queries, keys and values all come out of the same four features, and that is what the word "self" is doing in self-attention. = 3. Prepare for MatMul = We copy the queries across the top and the transposed keys down the side. Lining the two up is half the work. = 4. MatMul = Let us multiply K transpose by Q. Every cell is the dot product of one key with one query, which we use as a matching score. That works because the dot product is the numerator of cosine similarity: it is how alike two vectors are, before anyone divides by their lengths. = 5. Scale = We divide by the square root of dk, the dimension of a key vector, here 3. Without it the scores grow with the dimension and a 64-wide head would swamp the softmax. To keep the page doable in pen, the drawing approximates dividing by root 3 with halving. = 6. e to the power = Let us raise e to the power of each score. This is the first half of softmax, and the drawing uses 3 in place of e, which is close enough to do in your head. = 7. Sum = We add up each column: 16, 6, 7 and 12. = 8. Normalize = Let us divide every cell by its column sum. That gives the attention weight matrix in yellow, and each of its four columns is now a probability distribution over the four positions. The decimals are nudged as they are rounded, so every column still sums to exactly 1. = 9. MatMul = We multiply the value vectors by those weights. Each output is a blend of all four values, mixed in the proportion the attention matrix just decided, and it goes to the position-wise feed forward network in the next layer: the FFN box at the bottom of the page. The outputs: Attention weights (A), by column = [.2, .6, 0, .2], [.2, .4, .2, .2], [.4, .2, 0, .4], [.1, .7, .1, .1] Attention weighted features (Z) = [8, 2, 6], [8, 4, 4], [16, 4, 2], [4, 2, 7] The takeaway: attention is a weighted average, and everything before step 9 exists to decide the weights. Compare every position with every other, turn the scores into one distribution per position, then blend. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

27,292 views • 1 month ago

[CLIP] by Hand ✍️ The CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) model, a groundbreaking work by OpenAI, redefines the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. It is the basis of all the multi-modal foundation models we see today. How does CLIP work? Goal: 🟨 Learn a shared embedding space for text and image [1] Given ↳ A mini batch of 3 text-image pairs ↳ OpenAI used 400 million text-image pairs to train its original CLIP model. Process 1st pair: "big table" [2] 🟪 Text → 2 Vectors (3D) ↳ Look up word embedding vectors using word2vec. [3] 🟩 Image → 2 Vectors (4D) ↳ Divide the image into two patches. ↳ Flatten each patch [4] Process other pairs ↳ Repeat [2]-[3] [5] 🟪 Text Encoder & 🟩 Image Encoder ↳ Encode input vectors into feature vectors ↳ Here, both encoders are simple one layer perceptron (linear + ReLU) ↳ In practice, the encoders are usually transformer models. [6] 🟪 🟩 Mean Pooling: 2 → 1 vector ↳ Average 2 feature vectors into a single vector by averaging across the columns ↳ The goal is to have one vector to represent each image or text [7] 🟪 🟩 -> 🟨 Projection ↳ Note that the text and image feature vectors from the encoders have different dimensions (3D vs. 4D). ↳ Use a linear layer to project image and text vectors to a 2D shared embedding space. 🏋️ Contrastive Pre-training 🏋️ [8] Prepare for MatMul ↳ Copy text vectors (T1,T2,T3) ↳ Copy the transpose of image vectors (I1,I2,I3) ↳ They are all in the 2D shared embedding space. [9] 🟦 MatMul ↳ Multiply T and I matrices. ↳ This is equivalent to taking dot product between every pair of image and text vectors. ↳ The purpose is to use dot product to estimate the similarity between a pair of image-text. [10] 🟦 Softmax: e^x ↳ Raise e to the power of the number in each cell ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate e^□ with 3^□. [11] 🟦 Softmax: ∑ ↳ Sum each row for 🟩 image→🟪 text ↳ Sum each column for 🟪 text→ 🟩 image [12] 🟦 Softmax: 1 / sum ↳ Divide each element by the column sum to obtain a similarity matrix for 🟪 text→🟩 image ↳ Divide each element by the row sum to obtain a similarity matrix for 🟩 image→🟪 text [13] 🟥 Loss Gradients ↳ The "Targets" for the similarity matrices are Identity Matrices. ↳ Why? If I and T come from the same pair (i=j), we want the highest value, which is 1, and 0 otherwise. ↳ Apply the simple equation of [Similarity - Target] to compute gradients of for both directions. ↳ Why so simple? Because when Softmax and Cross-Entropy Loss are used together, the math magically works out that way. ↳ These gradients kick off the backpropagation process to update weights and biases of the encoders and projection layers (red borders).
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[CLIP] by Hand ✍️ The CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) model, a groundbreaking work by OpenAI, redefines the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing. It is the basis of all the multi-modal foundation models we see today. How does CLIP work? Goal: 🟨 Learn a shared embedding space for text and image [1] Given ↳ A mini batch of 3 text-image pairs ↳ OpenAI used 400 million text-image pairs to train its original CLIP model. Process 1st pair: "big table" [2] 🟪 Text → 2 Vectors (3D) ↳ Look up word embedding vectors using word2vec. [3] 🟩 Image → 2 Vectors (4D) ↳ Divide the image into two patches. ↳ Flatten each patch [4] Process other pairs ↳ Repeat [2]-[3] [5] 🟪 Text Encoder & 🟩 Image Encoder ↳ Encode input vectors into feature vectors ↳ Here, both encoders are simple one layer perceptron (linear + ReLU) ↳ In practice, the encoders are usually transformer models. [6] 🟪 🟩 Mean Pooling: 2 → 1 vector ↳ Average 2 feature vectors into a single vector by averaging across the columns ↳ The goal is to have one vector to represent each image or text [7] 🟪 🟩 -> 🟨 Projection ↳ Note that the text and image feature vectors from the encoders have different dimensions (3D vs. 4D). ↳ Use a linear layer to project image and text vectors to a 2D shared embedding space. 🏋️ Contrastive Pre-training 🏋️ [8] Prepare for MatMul ↳ Copy text vectors (T1,T2,T3) ↳ Copy the transpose of image vectors (I1,I2,I3) ↳ They are all in the 2D shared embedding space. [9] 🟦 MatMul ↳ Multiply T and I matrices. ↳ This is equivalent to taking dot product between every pair of image and text vectors. ↳ The purpose is to use dot product to estimate the similarity between a pair of image-text. [10] 🟦 Softmax: e^x ↳ Raise e to the power of the number in each cell ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate e^□ with 3^□. [11] 🟦 Softmax: ∑ ↳ Sum each row for 🟩 image→🟪 text ↳ Sum each column for 🟪 text→ 🟩 image [12] 🟦 Softmax: 1 / sum ↳ Divide each element by the column sum to obtain a similarity matrix for 🟪 text→🟩 image ↳ Divide each element by the row sum to obtain a similarity matrix for 🟩 image→🟪 text [13] 🟥 Loss Gradients ↳ The "Targets" for the similarity matrices are Identity Matrices. ↳ Why? If I and T come from the same pair (i=j), we want the highest value, which is 1, and 0 otherwise. ↳ Apply the simple equation of [Similarity - Target] to compute gradients of for both directions. ↳ Why so simple? Because when Softmax and Cross-Entropy Loss are used together, the math magically works out that way. ↳ These gradients kick off the backpropagation process to update weights and biases of the encoders and projection layers (red borders).

Tom Yeh

67,896 views • 2 years ago

SVM by hand ✍️ ~ 19 steps walkthrough below (Linear vs RBF) Support Vector Machines reigned supreme in machine learning before the deep learning revolution. An SVM predicts with dot products, the same matrix multiplication every model uses. What it does not do is train by backpropagation: it is fitted by convex optimization, so there is no matrix-multiplication backward pass for a GPU to accelerate. I drew and calculated two SVMs by hand: a linear one (top) and an RBF one (bottom), classifying the same two test vectors. Goal: turn six training vectors and their learned coefficients into a prediction, and see what changing the kernel actually changes. = 1. Given = Six training vectors, their labels, and the coefficients and bias already learned. A coefficient of zero means that vector is not a support vector: too far from the boundary to matter. = 2. Linear kernel, test vector 1 = Let us take the dot product of the test vector with every training vector. The dot product stands in for cosine similarity, and the column of results is the first column of the kernel matrix K. = 3. Linear kernel, test vector 2 = We do the same for the second, and K is complete. = 4. Signed weights = Let us multiply each coefficient by its label. The second training vector drops out here, because its coefficient is 0. = 5. Weighted combination = We multiply the signed weights through K and add the bias b. The result is a signed distance to the decision boundary: 17 and 5. = 6. Classify = Let us take the sign. Both are positive. = 7 to 11. RBF kernel, test vector 1 = Now the same picture with a different kernel, in five moves: square the differences, sum them, take the square root for the L2 distance, multiply by minus gamma, and raise e to that power. The negation is what turns a distance into a similarity, and gamma controls how far a single training vector's influence reaches. = 12 to 16. RBF kernel, test vector 2 = We repeat all five. The numbers change, the moves do not. = 17 to 19. Decision boundary, again = Signed weights, weighted combination, sign. Identical arithmetic to steps 4 through 6, on a K that was built a completely different way. The outputs: Linear K, first column = [13, 25, 12, 15, 19, 27] Linear decision values = 17 and 5, both positive RBF decision values = -2 and 1, so negative and positive The takeaway: the kernel is the only thing that changed, and it changed the answer. The linear SVM calls both test vectors positive; the RBF one splits them. Everything after the kernel matrix, the signed weights and the weighted combination and the sign, is the same page of arithmetic twice. 💾 Save this post!
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SVM by hand ✍️ ~ 19 steps walkthrough below (Linear vs RBF) Support Vector Machines reigned supreme in machine learning before the deep learning revolution. An SVM predicts with dot products, the same matrix multiplication every model uses. What it does not do is train by backpropagation: it is fitted by convex optimization, so there is no matrix-multiplication backward pass for a GPU to accelerate. I drew and calculated two SVMs by hand: a linear one (top) and an RBF one (bottom), classifying the same two test vectors. Goal: turn six training vectors and their learned coefficients into a prediction, and see what changing the kernel actually changes. = 1. Given = Six training vectors, their labels, and the coefficients and bias already learned. A coefficient of zero means that vector is not a support vector: too far from the boundary to matter. = 2. Linear kernel, test vector 1 = Let us take the dot product of the test vector with every training vector. The dot product stands in for cosine similarity, and the column of results is the first column of the kernel matrix K. = 3. Linear kernel, test vector 2 = We do the same for the second, and K is complete. = 4. Signed weights = Let us multiply each coefficient by its label. The second training vector drops out here, because its coefficient is 0. = 5. Weighted combination = We multiply the signed weights through K and add the bias b. The result is a signed distance to the decision boundary: 17 and 5. = 6. Classify = Let us take the sign. Both are positive. = 7 to 11. RBF kernel, test vector 1 = Now the same picture with a different kernel, in five moves: square the differences, sum them, take the square root for the L2 distance, multiply by minus gamma, and raise e to that power. The negation is what turns a distance into a similarity, and gamma controls how far a single training vector's influence reaches. = 12 to 16. RBF kernel, test vector 2 = We repeat all five. The numbers change, the moves do not. = 17 to 19. Decision boundary, again = Signed weights, weighted combination, sign. Identical arithmetic to steps 4 through 6, on a K that was built a completely different way. The outputs: Linear K, first column = [13, 25, 12, 15, 19, 27] Linear decision values = 17 and 5, both positive RBF decision values = -2 and 1, so negative and positive The takeaway: the kernel is the only thing that changed, and it changed the answer. The linear SVM calls both test vectors positive; the RBF one splits them. Everything after the kernel matrix, the signed weights and the weighted combination and the sign, is the same page of arithmetic twice. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

16,916 views • 1 month ago

ResNet by hand ✍️ ~ 10 steps walkthrough below "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition" (Kaiming He, CVPR 2016) is among the most cited papers in all of deep learning. Why does it matter so much? It fixed the exploding and vanishing gradients that kept deep networks from being deep, and made thousands of layers possible. How simple was the fix? An identity matrix. Goal: push three input vectors through a residual block, then through a transformer encoder block, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = A mini batch of three input vectors, 3D, and the weights of the layers ahead. = 2. Linear layer = Let us multiply by the weights, add the bias, and apply ReLU so negatives become 0. Three feature vectors out. This is F(X). = 3. Concatenate = Now the trick. Stack an identity matrix beside the second layer's weights, and stack the input vectors under the features. Draw the lines between rows and columns: those are the skip connections. The identity is the residual. = 4. Linear layer + identity = We multiply the two stacked matrices. The identity carries X straight through while the weights transform it, so a single multiplication computes F(X) + X. Apply ReLU and hand it to the next block. Now watch the same trick inside a transformer, first in attention. = 5. Attention = Let us take three input vectors in 2D, compute the attention matrix, and multiply to get attention weighted vectors. = 6. Concatenate = We stack two identities this time, two residuals, which is how you get 1 + 1, and stack the input vectors with the attention weighted ones. = 7. Add = Multiply the stacked matrices. The identity adds attention to its own input, across the columns, which is how positions get combined. And again in the feed forward layer. = 8. First layer = Let us multiply by the feed forward weights and bias, then ReLU. Three feature vectors. = 9. Concatenate = Stack and link exactly as in step 3: the residual again. = 10. Second layer + identity = We multiply, apply ReLU, and pass the result to the next encoder block. This identity adds across the rows, combining features rather than positions. Takeaway: one simple "add" is what made really deep networks possible. 💾 Save this post!
0:27

ResNet by hand ✍️ ~ 10 steps walkthrough below "Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition" (Kaiming He, CVPR 2016) is among the most cited papers in all of deep learning. Why does it matter so much? It fixed the exploding and vanishing gradients that kept deep networks from being deep, and made thousands of layers possible. How simple was the fix? An identity matrix. Goal: push three input vectors through a residual block, then through a transformer encoder block, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = A mini batch of three input vectors, 3D, and the weights of the layers ahead. = 2. Linear layer = Let us multiply by the weights, add the bias, and apply ReLU so negatives become 0. Three feature vectors out. This is F(X). = 3. Concatenate = Now the trick. Stack an identity matrix beside the second layer's weights, and stack the input vectors under the features. Draw the lines between rows and columns: those are the skip connections. The identity is the residual. = 4. Linear layer + identity = We multiply the two stacked matrices. The identity carries X straight through while the weights transform it, so a single multiplication computes F(X) + X. Apply ReLU and hand it to the next block. Now watch the same trick inside a transformer, first in attention. = 5. Attention = Let us take three input vectors in 2D, compute the attention matrix, and multiply to get attention weighted vectors. = 6. Concatenate = We stack two identities this time, two residuals, which is how you get 1 + 1, and stack the input vectors with the attention weighted ones. = 7. Add = Multiply the stacked matrices. The identity adds attention to its own input, across the columns, which is how positions get combined. And again in the feed forward layer. = 8. First layer = Let us multiply by the feed forward weights and bias, then ReLU. Three feature vectors. = 9. Concatenate = Stack and link exactly as in step 3: the residual again. = 10. Second layer + identity = We multiply, apply ReLU, and pass the result to the next encoder block. This identity adds across the rows, combining features rather than positions. Takeaway: one simple "add" is what made really deep networks possible. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

18,152 views • 1 month ago

RLHF by hand ✍️ ~ 15 steps walkthrough below Train a model on human text and it inherits human bias. It will assume a doctor is a "him", because the data says so. RLHF is the correction. A human marks one preference, doc is them over doc is him, and the weights move. But one correction is not the point. The hope is that the model learns the value behind it, gender neutrality, and applies it to professions nobody ever mentioned. How does it work? Goal: train a reward model from a single human comparison about doctors, then turn it on CEOs, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = A reward model, an LLM, and two (prompt, next) pairs. = 2. Preferences = A human reads both pairs and picks a winner: (doc is, them) beats (doc is, him). The loser is not bad grammar, it is gender bias, and that is the whole signal. = 3. Word embeddings = Let us look up each word of the loser pair. These vectors are the reward model's input. = 4. Linear layer = We multiply by the reward model's weights and add its biases. Out come feature vectors, one per position. = 5. Mean pool = Let us multiply by [1/3, 1/3, 1/3], which averages the three positions into one sentence embedding. = 6. Output layer = We map that sentence down to a single number. Reward = 3. = 7. The winner, the same way = Let us repeat steps 3 to 6 on the winning pair. Reward = 5. = 8. Winner minus loser = We take the gap: 5 - 3 = 2. The reward model wants this positive and as large as it can make it. = 9. Loss gradient = Let us squash the gap into a probability, σ(2) ≈ 0.9, and subtract the target of 1. The gradient is -0.1, and it goes back through the purple weights. The reward model is now trained. = 10. A prompt it has never seen = We start the second half with "[S] CEO is". The feedback in step 2 was about doctors. Nothing connects a CEO to a doctor except what the reward model generalised. = 11. Transformer = Let us push it through attention and a feed forward layer, one vector per position. = 12. Output probabilities = We map each vector to a score over the vocabulary. = 13. Sample = Let us take the highest score. The model completes "CEO is" with "him", which is the same bias the human penalised in step 2. = 14. Score it with the reward model = We feed the new pair (CEO is, him) through steps 3 to 6. Reward = 3, exactly the score it gave "doc is him" in step 6. Nobody taught it about CEOs. The value transferred. = 15. Loss gradient = Let us set the loss to the negative of the reward, so minimising the loss maximises the reward. The gradient is a constant -1, and it goes back through the red weights. The outputs: Loser reward = 3, winner reward = 5 Reward gap = 2, predicted σ ≈ 0.9, reward model gradient = -0.1 LLM samples "him", reward = 3, LLM gradient = -1 Congrats! You just calculated RLHF by hand. And you watched a value generalise: one comparison about doctors, and the model marks down "CEO is him" unprompted. 💾 Save this post!
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RLHF by hand ✍️ ~ 15 steps walkthrough below Train a model on human text and it inherits human bias. It will assume a doctor is a "him", because the data says so. RLHF is the correction. A human marks one preference, doc is them over doc is him, and the weights move. But one correction is not the point. The hope is that the model learns the value behind it, gender neutrality, and applies it to professions nobody ever mentioned. How does it work? Goal: train a reward model from a single human comparison about doctors, then turn it on CEOs, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = A reward model, an LLM, and two (prompt, next) pairs. = 2. Preferences = A human reads both pairs and picks a winner: (doc is, them) beats (doc is, him). The loser is not bad grammar, it is gender bias, and that is the whole signal. = 3. Word embeddings = Let us look up each word of the loser pair. These vectors are the reward model's input. = 4. Linear layer = We multiply by the reward model's weights and add its biases. Out come feature vectors, one per position. = 5. Mean pool = Let us multiply by [1/3, 1/3, 1/3], which averages the three positions into one sentence embedding. = 6. Output layer = We map that sentence down to a single number. Reward = 3. = 7. The winner, the same way = Let us repeat steps 3 to 6 on the winning pair. Reward = 5. = 8. Winner minus loser = We take the gap: 5 - 3 = 2. The reward model wants this positive and as large as it can make it. = 9. Loss gradient = Let us squash the gap into a probability, σ(2) ≈ 0.9, and subtract the target of 1. The gradient is -0.1, and it goes back through the purple weights. The reward model is now trained. = 10. A prompt it has never seen = We start the second half with "[S] CEO is". The feedback in step 2 was about doctors. Nothing connects a CEO to a doctor except what the reward model generalised. = 11. Transformer = Let us push it through attention and a feed forward layer, one vector per position. = 12. Output probabilities = We map each vector to a score over the vocabulary. = 13. Sample = Let us take the highest score. The model completes "CEO is" with "him", which is the same bias the human penalised in step 2. = 14. Score it with the reward model = We feed the new pair (CEO is, him) through steps 3 to 6. Reward = 3, exactly the score it gave "doc is him" in step 6. Nobody taught it about CEOs. The value transferred. = 15. Loss gradient = Let us set the loss to the negative of the reward, so minimising the loss maximises the reward. The gradient is a constant -1, and it goes back through the red weights. The outputs: Loser reward = 3, winner reward = 5 Reward gap = 2, predicted σ ≈ 0.9, reward model gradient = -0.1 LLM samples "him", reward = 3, LLM gradient = -1 Congrats! You just calculated RLHF by hand. And you watched a value generalise: one comparison about doctors, and the model marks down "CEO is him" unprompted. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

22,529 views • 1 month ago

Discrete Fourier Transform by hand ✍️ ~ 12 steps walkthrough below Here is a little-known secret about the DFT and the inverse DFT: it is just matrix multiplication in both directions, one the transpose of the other, exactly like the forward pass and backpropagation I drew in other examples. Goal: recover which cosine waves a signal is made of, using nothing but multiplication and addition. = 1. Given = Three signals written as sums of cosines, and a fourth, X, that we do not know yet. = 2. Frequency matrix F = Let us write the coefficients as a matrix. Each signal is a row, each frequency a column, so A = cos(w) + 2cos(2w) becomes [1, 2, 0, 0]. = 3. Sample the waves = We read the four cosine waves at ten discrete time points. That word "discrete" is the whole difference between this and the continuous transform. = 4. Cosine matrix W = Let us write those samples as a matrix: each frequency a row, each time point a column. = 5. Frequency to time = We multiply F by W. That combines the four cosine waves in the proportions F specifies, and the result T is the three signals as they would look in time. = 6. Transpose = Let us stand each signal up as a column. = 7. Time to frequency = We multiply W by that transpose. Every cell is the dot product of one signal with one cosine wave, which measures how much of that wave the signal contains. Zero means none of it. = 8. Scale = Let us multiply by 2/n, with n = 10. The projections come out five times too large, and this is the correction. = 9. Transpose back = We turn it back around, and it is F again, exactly. That is the check: the transform recovered the coefficients we started from. = 10. Now solve for X = Let us run the same multiplication on the one signal whose recipe we never knew. = 11. Scale = We divide by 5 again. = 12. Transpose back = And X reads [0, 0, 3, 2], which says X = 3cos(3w) + 2cos(4w). Note: I originally drew this to show that the DFT is a special case of a convolution layer, its filters fixed to sine and cosine waves rather than learned. No wonder, then, that a convolution layer free to learn its own filters can be trained to process signals. 💾 Save this post!
0:32

Discrete Fourier Transform by hand ✍️ ~ 12 steps walkthrough below Here is a little-known secret about the DFT and the inverse DFT: it is just matrix multiplication in both directions, one the transpose of the other, exactly like the forward pass and backpropagation I drew in other examples. Goal: recover which cosine waves a signal is made of, using nothing but multiplication and addition. = 1. Given = Three signals written as sums of cosines, and a fourth, X, that we do not know yet. = 2. Frequency matrix F = Let us write the coefficients as a matrix. Each signal is a row, each frequency a column, so A = cos(w) + 2cos(2w) becomes [1, 2, 0, 0]. = 3. Sample the waves = We read the four cosine waves at ten discrete time points. That word "discrete" is the whole difference between this and the continuous transform. = 4. Cosine matrix W = Let us write those samples as a matrix: each frequency a row, each time point a column. = 5. Frequency to time = We multiply F by W. That combines the four cosine waves in the proportions F specifies, and the result T is the three signals as they would look in time. = 6. Transpose = Let us stand each signal up as a column. = 7. Time to frequency = We multiply W by that transpose. Every cell is the dot product of one signal with one cosine wave, which measures how much of that wave the signal contains. Zero means none of it. = 8. Scale = Let us multiply by 2/n, with n = 10. The projections come out five times too large, and this is the correction. = 9. Transpose back = We turn it back around, and it is F again, exactly. That is the check: the transform recovered the coefficients we started from. = 10. Now solve for X = Let us run the same multiplication on the one signal whose recipe we never knew. = 11. Scale = We divide by 5 again. = 12. Transpose back = And X reads [0, 0, 3, 2], which says X = 3cos(3w) + 2cos(4w). Note: I originally drew this to show that the DFT is a special case of a convolution layer, its filters fixed to sine and cosine waves rather than learned. No wonder, then, that a convolution layer free to learn its own filters can be trained to process signals. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

13,258 views • 8 days ago

Discrete Fourier Transform by hand ✍️ ~ 12 steps walkthrough below Here is a little-known secret about the DFT and the inverse DFT: it is just matrix multiplication in both directions, one the transpose of the other, exactly like the forward pass and backpropagation I drew in other examples. Goal: recover which cosine waves a signal is made of, using nothing but multiplication and addition. = 1. Given = Three signals written as sums of cosines, and a fourth, X, that we do not know yet. = 2. Frequency matrix F = Let us write the coefficients as a matrix. Each signal is a row, each frequency a column, so A = cos(w) + 2cos(2w) becomes [1, 2, 0, 0]. = 3. Sample the waves = We read the four cosine waves at ten discrete time points. That word "discrete" is the whole difference between this and the continuous transform. = 4. Cosine matrix W = Let us write those samples as a matrix: each frequency a row, each time point a column. = 5. Frequency to time = We multiply F by W. That combines the four cosine waves in the proportions F specifies, and the result T is the three signals as they would look in time. = 6. Transpose = Let us stand each signal up as a column. = 7. Time to frequency = We multiply W by that transpose. Every cell is the dot product of one signal with one cosine wave, which measures how much of that wave the signal contains. Zero means none of it. = 8. Scale = Let us multiply by 2/n, with n = 10. The projections come out five times too large, and this is the correction. = 9. Transpose back = We turn it back around, and it is F again, exactly. That is the check: the transform recovered the coefficients we started from. = 10. Now solve for X = Let us run the same multiplication on the one signal whose recipe we never knew. = 11. Scale = We divide by 5 again. = 12. Transpose back = And X reads [0, 0, 3, 2], which says X = 3cos(3w) + 2cos(4w). Note: I originally drew this to show that the DFT is a special case of a convolution layer, its filters fixed to sine and cosine waves rather than learned. No wonder, then, that a convolution layer free to learn its own filters can be trained to process signals. 💾 Save this post!
0:32

Discrete Fourier Transform by hand ✍️ ~ 12 steps walkthrough below Here is a little-known secret about the DFT and the inverse DFT: it is just matrix multiplication in both directions, one the transpose of the other, exactly like the forward pass and backpropagation I drew in other examples. Goal: recover which cosine waves a signal is made of, using nothing but multiplication and addition. = 1. Given = Three signals written as sums of cosines, and a fourth, X, that we do not know yet. = 2. Frequency matrix F = Let us write the coefficients as a matrix. Each signal is a row, each frequency a column, so A = cos(w) + 2cos(2w) becomes [1, 2, 0, 0]. = 3. Sample the waves = We read the four cosine waves at ten discrete time points. That word "discrete" is the whole difference between this and the continuous transform. = 4. Cosine matrix W = Let us write those samples as a matrix: each frequency a row, each time point a column. = 5. Frequency to time = We multiply F by W. That combines the four cosine waves in the proportions F specifies, and the result T is the three signals as they would look in time. = 6. Transpose = Let us stand each signal up as a column. = 7. Time to frequency = We multiply W by that transpose. Every cell is the dot product of one signal with one cosine wave, which measures how much of that wave the signal contains. Zero means none of it. = 8. Scale = Let us multiply by 2/n, with n = 10. The projections come out five times too large, and this is the correction. = 9. Transpose back = We turn it back around, and it is F again, exactly. That is the check: the transform recovered the coefficients we started from. = 10. Now solve for X = Let us run the same multiplication on the one signal whose recipe we never knew. = 11. Scale = We divide by 5 again. = 12. Transpose back = And X reads [0, 0, 3, 2], which says X = 3cos(3w) + 2cos(4w). Note: I originally drew this to show that the DFT is a special case of a convolution layer, its filters fixed to sine and cosine waves rather than learned. No wonder, then, that a convolution layer free to learn its own filters can be trained to process signals. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

25,684 views • 1 month ago

[Self-Attention] by Hand ✍️ Self-attention is what enables LLMs to understand context. How does it work? This exercise demonstrates how to calculate a 6-3 attention head by hand. Note that if we have two instances of this, we get 6-6 attention (i.e., multi-head attention, n=2). -- 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹 -- Transform [6D Features 🟧] to [3D Attention Weighted Features 🟦] -- 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 -- [1] Given ↳ A set of 4 feature vectors (6-D): x1,x2,x3,x4 [2] Query, Key, Value ↳ Multiply features x's with linear transformation matrices WQ, WK, and WV, to obtain query vectors (q1,q2,q3,q4), key vectors (k1,k2,k3,k4), and value vectors (v1,v2,v3,v4). ↳ "Self" refers to the fact that both queries and keys are derived from the same set of features. [3] 🟪 Prepare for MatMul ↳ Copy query vectors ↳ Copy the transpose of key vectors [4] 🟪 MatMul ↳ Multiply K^T and Q ↳ This is equivalent to taking dot product between every pair of query and key vectors. ↳ The purpose is to use dot product as an estimate of the "matching score" between every key-value pair. ↳ This estimate makes sense because dot product is the numerator of Cosine Similarity between two vectors. [5] 🟨 Scale ↳ Scale each element by the square root of dk, which is the dimension of key vectors (dk=3). ↳ The purpose is to normalize the impact of the dk on matching scores, even if we scale dk to 32, 64, or 128. ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate [ □/sqrt(3) ] with [ floor(□/2) ]. [6] 🟩 Softmax: e^x ↳ Raise e to the power of the number in each cell ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate e^□ with 3^□. [7] 🟩 Softmax: ∑ ↳ Sum across each column [8] 🟩 Softmax: 1 / sum ↳ For each column, divide each element by the column sum ↳ The purpose is normalize each column so that the numbers sum to 1. In other words, each column is a probability distribution of attention, and we have four of them. ↳ The result is the Attention Weight Matrix (A) (yellow) [9] 🟦 MatMul ↳ Multiply the value vectors (Vs) with the Attention Weight Matrix (A) ↳ The results are the attention weighted features Zs. ↳ They are fed to the position-wise feed forward network in the next layer.
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[Self-Attention] by Hand ✍️ Self-attention is what enables LLMs to understand context. How does it work? This exercise demonstrates how to calculate a 6-3 attention head by hand. Note that if we have two instances of this, we get 6-6 attention (i.e., multi-head attention, n=2). -- 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹 -- Transform [6D Features 🟧] to [3D Attention Weighted Features 🟦] -- 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗸𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 -- [1] Given ↳ A set of 4 feature vectors (6-D): x1,x2,x3,x4 [2] Query, Key, Value ↳ Multiply features x's with linear transformation matrices WQ, WK, and WV, to obtain query vectors (q1,q2,q3,q4), key vectors (k1,k2,k3,k4), and value vectors (v1,v2,v3,v4). ↳ "Self" refers to the fact that both queries and keys are derived from the same set of features. [3] 🟪 Prepare for MatMul ↳ Copy query vectors ↳ Copy the transpose of key vectors [4] 🟪 MatMul ↳ Multiply K^T and Q ↳ This is equivalent to taking dot product between every pair of query and key vectors. ↳ The purpose is to use dot product as an estimate of the "matching score" between every key-value pair. ↳ This estimate makes sense because dot product is the numerator of Cosine Similarity between two vectors. [5] 🟨 Scale ↳ Scale each element by the square root of dk, which is the dimension of key vectors (dk=3). ↳ The purpose is to normalize the impact of the dk on matching scores, even if we scale dk to 32, 64, or 128. ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate [ □/sqrt(3) ] with [ floor(□/2) ]. [6] 🟩 Softmax: e^x ↳ Raise e to the power of the number in each cell ↳ To simplify hand calculation, we approximate e^□ with 3^□. [7] 🟩 Softmax: ∑ ↳ Sum across each column [8] 🟩 Softmax: 1 / sum ↳ For each column, divide each element by the column sum ↳ The purpose is normalize each column so that the numbers sum to 1. In other words, each column is a probability distribution of attention, and we have four of them. ↳ The result is the Attention Weight Matrix (A) (yellow) [9] 🟦 MatMul ↳ Multiply the value vectors (Vs) with the Attention Weight Matrix (A) ↳ The results are the attention weighted features Zs. ↳ They are fed to the position-wise feed forward network in the next layer.

Tom Yeh

101,213 views • 2 years ago

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by hand ✍️ ~ 9 steps walkthrough below The Gen in GenAI came from this landmark paper by Ian Goodfellow et al., 12 years ago. The paper showed that a neural network can not only classify but also turn upside down to generate realistic looking images. The secret? We pit two of them against each other: a Generator turns noise into fake data, and a Discriminator learns to tell fake from real, pushing the Generator to keep doing better. One runs upside down, the other right way up. I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: generate realistic 4D data out of 2D noise, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = Four noise vectors in 2D, and four real data vectors in 4D. = 2. Generator, first layer = Let us multiply the noise by weights and biases to get new features. = 3. ReLU = We apply the activation, and -1 and -2 are crossed out and set to 0. = 4. Generator, second layer = Let us multiply again. ReLU applies here too, but every value is already positive, so nothing changes. What comes out is the fake data F, made by a two-layer generator out of nothing but noise. = 5. Discriminator, first layer = We feed it both, the four fakes and the four real vectors, through the same weights. It never learns which is which from the layout, only from the numbers. = 6. Discriminator, second layer = Let us reduce each data vector to a single feature Z. Eight vectors in, eight numbers out. = 7. Sigmoid = We turn each Z into a probability Y. A 1 means the discriminator is certain the data is real, a 0 means certain it is fake. = 8. Training the Discriminator = Let us take the gradients as Y minus YD, where YD is what the discriminator should have said: 0 for the four fakes, 1 for the four real. Why so simple? Because pairing sigmoid with binary cross entropy loss makes the math collapse to exactly this subtraction. Its loss uses both halves of the page. = 9. Training the Generator = We do it again, as Y minus YG, and YG is [1, 1, 1, 1]: the generator wants the discriminator to call every fake real. Same predictions, different target, opposite goal. Its loss uses only the fakes. The outputs: Fake data F = [1, 2, 3, 1], [1, 1, 2, 1], [2, 2, 4, 2], [1, 0, 1, 1] Predictions on fakes = [.7, .5, .9, .3] Predictions on real = [.7, .9, .9, 1] Discriminator gradients = [.7, .5, .9, .3] and [-.3, -.1, -.1, 0] Generator gradients = [-.3, -.5, -.1, -.7] The takeaway: the adversarial part is one subtraction done twice. The same eight predictions, scored against two opposite targets, send one set of gradients back through the blue weights and another back through the green ones. 💾 Save this post!
0:23

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) by hand ✍️ ~ 9 steps walkthrough below The Gen in GenAI came from this landmark paper by Ian Goodfellow et al., 12 years ago. The paper showed that a neural network can not only classify but also turn upside down to generate realistic looking images. The secret? We pit two of them against each other: a Generator turns noise into fake data, and a Discriminator learns to tell fake from real, pushing the Generator to keep doing better. One runs upside down, the other right way up. I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: generate realistic 4D data out of 2D noise, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = Four noise vectors in 2D, and four real data vectors in 4D. = 2. Generator, first layer = Let us multiply the noise by weights and biases to get new features. = 3. ReLU = We apply the activation, and -1 and -2 are crossed out and set to 0. = 4. Generator, second layer = Let us multiply again. ReLU applies here too, but every value is already positive, so nothing changes. What comes out is the fake data F, made by a two-layer generator out of nothing but noise. = 5. Discriminator, first layer = We feed it both, the four fakes and the four real vectors, through the same weights. It never learns which is which from the layout, only from the numbers. = 6. Discriminator, second layer = Let us reduce each data vector to a single feature Z. Eight vectors in, eight numbers out. = 7. Sigmoid = We turn each Z into a probability Y. A 1 means the discriminator is certain the data is real, a 0 means certain it is fake. = 8. Training the Discriminator = Let us take the gradients as Y minus YD, where YD is what the discriminator should have said: 0 for the four fakes, 1 for the four real. Why so simple? Because pairing sigmoid with binary cross entropy loss makes the math collapse to exactly this subtraction. Its loss uses both halves of the page. = 9. Training the Generator = We do it again, as Y minus YG, and YG is [1, 1, 1, 1]: the generator wants the discriminator to call every fake real. Same predictions, different target, opposite goal. Its loss uses only the fakes. The outputs: Fake data F = [1, 2, 3, 1], [1, 1, 2, 1], [2, 2, 4, 2], [1, 0, 1, 1] Predictions on fakes = [.7, .5, .9, .3] Predictions on real = [.7, .9, .9, 1] Discriminator gradients = [.7, .5, .9, .3] and [-.3, -.1, -.1, 0] Generator gradients = [-.3, -.5, -.1, -.7] The takeaway: the adversarial part is one subtraction done twice. The same eight predictions, scored against two opposite targets, send one set of gradients back through the blue weights and another back through the green ones. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

16,752 views • 1 month ago

Backpropagation by hand ✍️ ~ 11 steps walkthrough below Backpropagation is the algorithm that actually trains a neural network, and it is where most people stop following along. It is not calculus you cannot do. It is matrix multiplication, working backward, one layer at a time. So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: push the loss gradient back through a 3-layer network and land on a new value for every weight and bias. = 1. Given = A 3-layer perceptron, an input X, predictions Ypred = [0.5, 0.5, 0], and the truth Ytarget = [0, 1, 0]. = 2. Backprop gradient cells = Let us draw empty cells for every gradient we are about to compute. The shape of the answer comes first. = 3. Layer 3 softmax = We get dL/dz3 straight from Ypred minus Ytarget = [0.5, -0.5, 0]. No chain rule needed, and that shortcut is the whole reason softmax and cross-entropy are paired. = 4. Layer 3 weights and biases = Let us multiply dL/dz3 by [a2 | 1]. One multiplication gives the gradient for W3 and b3 together. = 5. Layer 2 activations = We multiply dL/dz3 by W3 to get dL/da2. The gradient moves back across a layer the same way the signal moved forward. = 6. Layer 2 ReLU = Let us pass it through the gate: keep the gradient where the activation was positive, zero it everywhere else. = 7. Layer 2 weights and biases = We multiply dL/dz2 by [a1 | 1]. The same figure as step 4, one layer up. = 8. Layer 1 activations = Let us multiply dL/dz2 by W2. = 9. Layer 1 ReLU = We apply the same gate again, now on a1. = 10. Layer 1 weights and biases = Let us multiply dL/dz1 by [x | 1], and every weight in the network now has a gradient. = 11. Update = We subtract, and the network has learned. In practice a learning rate scales this step. The gradients: dL/dz3 = [0.5, -0.5, 0] dL/da1 = [1, -2, 2, -1] dL/dz1 = [0, -2, 2, -1] The takeaway: matrix multiplication is all you need. Just like the forward pass, backpropagation is matrix multiplications end to end. You can do every one by hand, slowly and imperfectly, which is exactly why a GPU's ability to do them fast mattered so much to deep learning. 💾 Save this post!
0:26

Backpropagation by hand ✍️ ~ 11 steps walkthrough below Backpropagation is the algorithm that actually trains a neural network, and it is where most people stop following along. It is not calculus you cannot do. It is matrix multiplication, working backward, one layer at a time. So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: push the loss gradient back through a 3-layer network and land on a new value for every weight and bias. = 1. Given = A 3-layer perceptron, an input X, predictions Ypred = [0.5, 0.5, 0], and the truth Ytarget = [0, 1, 0]. = 2. Backprop gradient cells = Let us draw empty cells for every gradient we are about to compute. The shape of the answer comes first. = 3. Layer 3 softmax = We get dL/dz3 straight from Ypred minus Ytarget = [0.5, -0.5, 0]. No chain rule needed, and that shortcut is the whole reason softmax and cross-entropy are paired. = 4. Layer 3 weights and biases = Let us multiply dL/dz3 by [a2 | 1]. One multiplication gives the gradient for W3 and b3 together. = 5. Layer 2 activations = We multiply dL/dz3 by W3 to get dL/da2. The gradient moves back across a layer the same way the signal moved forward. = 6. Layer 2 ReLU = Let us pass it through the gate: keep the gradient where the activation was positive, zero it everywhere else. = 7. Layer 2 weights and biases = We multiply dL/dz2 by [a1 | 1]. The same figure as step 4, one layer up. = 8. Layer 1 activations = Let us multiply dL/dz2 by W2. = 9. Layer 1 ReLU = We apply the same gate again, now on a1. = 10. Layer 1 weights and biases = Let us multiply dL/dz1 by [x | 1], and every weight in the network now has a gradient. = 11. Update = We subtract, and the network has learned. In practice a learning rate scales this step. The gradients: dL/dz3 = [0.5, -0.5, 0] dL/da1 = [1, -2, 2, -1] dL/dz1 = [0, -2, 2, -1] The takeaway: matrix multiplication is all you need. Just like the forward pass, backpropagation is matrix multiplications end to end. You can do every one by hand, slowly and imperfectly, which is exactly why a GPU's ability to do them fast mattered so much to deep learning. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

961,186 views • 1 month ago

Traditional data pipelines don't work for RAG applications. There are 3 issues with them: ​ 1. Traditional data engineering solutions are optimized to handle structured data. RAG applications rely primarily on unstructured data. ​ 2. The connector ecosystem to load data from unstructured data sources is very immature. ​ 3. Traditional solutions do not offer any way to transform unstructured data into an optimized vector search index. ​ The goal of a RAG Pipeline is to solve these problems. ​ The number one objective is to create a reliable vector search index using factual knowledge and relevant context. This sounds easy, but it's one of the biggest challenges we face when building RAG applications. ​ At a high level, there are four different stages in the architecture of a RAG pipeline: ​ 1. Ingestion: Here is where the pipeline loads the information from the data source. ​ 2. Extraction: Where the pipeline processes the input data and decides how to retrieve the text contained inside them. ​ 3. Transform: Where the pipeline chunks the data and generates document embeddings. ​ 4. Load: Where the pipeline creates a search index in a vector database and loads the document embeddings. ​ There are different rabbit holes at each one of these stages. Here are three of them: ​ 1. Ingesting data once is simple. The hard part is refreshing the vector database whenever the original data source changes. ​ 2. Extracting the content of a plain text document is simple. The hard part is to extract content from complex documents containing tables, images, or cross-references. ​ 3. A simple continual chunking strategy with an overlap is simple. The hard part is to find the optimal strategy for your specific knowledge base and the way you are planning to query it. ​ In the attached video, I'll show you how you can build an enterprise-grade RAG Pipeline that solves every one of the above problems. ​ I'll use Vectorize. They partnered with me on this post. You can use them to build RAG pipelines optimized for accurate context retrieval. ​ ​ If you have a few documents lying around, set up a free account and give it a try.
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Traditional data pipelines don't work for RAG applications. There are 3 issues with them: ​ 1. Traditional data engineering solutions are optimized to handle structured data. RAG applications rely primarily on unstructured data. ​ 2. The connector ecosystem to load data from unstructured data sources is very immature. ​ 3. Traditional solutions do not offer any way to transform unstructured data into an optimized vector search index. ​ The goal of a RAG Pipeline is to solve these problems. ​ The number one objective is to create a reliable vector search index using factual knowledge and relevant context. This sounds easy, but it's one of the biggest challenges we face when building RAG applications. ​ At a high level, there are four different stages in the architecture of a RAG pipeline: ​ 1. Ingestion: Here is where the pipeline loads the information from the data source. ​ 2. Extraction: Where the pipeline processes the input data and decides how to retrieve the text contained inside them. ​ 3. Transform: Where the pipeline chunks the data and generates document embeddings. ​ 4. Load: Where the pipeline creates a search index in a vector database and loads the document embeddings. ​ There are different rabbit holes at each one of these stages. Here are three of them: ​ 1. Ingesting data once is simple. The hard part is refreshing the vector database whenever the original data source changes. ​ 2. Extracting the content of a plain text document is simple. The hard part is to extract content from complex documents containing tables, images, or cross-references. ​ 3. A simple continual chunking strategy with an overlap is simple. The hard part is to find the optimal strategy for your specific knowledge base and the way you are planning to query it. ​ In the attached video, I'll show you how you can build an enterprise-grade RAG Pipeline that solves every one of the above problems. ​ I'll use Vectorize. They partnered with me on this post. You can use them to build RAG pipelines optimized for accurate context retrieval. ​ ​ If you have a few documents lying around, set up a free account and give it a try.

Santiago

40,627 views • 1 year ago

[RLHF] by Hand ✍️ Yesterday, Jan Leike (Jan Leike) announced he is joining #Anthropic to lead their "super-alignment" mission. He is the co-inventor of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (#RLHF). How does RLHF work? [1] Given ↳ Reward Model (RM) ↳ Large Language Model (LLM) ↳ Two (Prompt, Next) Pairs 🟪 TRAIN RM Goal: Learn to give higher rewards to winners [2] Preferences ↳ A human reviews the two pairs and picks a "winner" ↳ (doc is, him) Embeddings ↳ This prompt has never received human feedback directly ↳ [S] is the special start symbol [11] Transformer ↳ Attention (yellow) ↳ Feed Forward (4x2 weight and bias matrix) ↳ Output: 3 "transformed" feature vector, one per position ↳ More details in my previous post 8. Transformer [] [12] Output Probabilities ↳ Apply a linear layer to map each transformed feature vector to a probability distribution over the vocabulary. [13] Sample ↳ Apply the greedy method, which is to pick the word with the highest score ↳ For output 1 and 2, the model accurately predicts the next word ↳ For 3rd output position, the model's predicts "him" [14] Reward Model ↳ The new pair (CEO is, him) is fed to the reward model ↳ The process is same as [3]-[6] ↳ Output: Reward = 3 [15] Loss Gradient ↳ We set the loss as the negative of the reward. ↳ The loss gradient is simply a constant -1. ↳ Run backpropagation and gradient descent to update LLM's weights and biases (red border)
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[RLHF] by Hand ✍️ Yesterday, Jan Leike (Jan Leike) announced he is joining #Anthropic to lead their "super-alignment" mission. He is the co-inventor of Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (#RLHF). How does RLHF work? [1] Given ↳ Reward Model (RM) ↳ Large Language Model (LLM) ↳ Two (Prompt, Next) Pairs 🟪 TRAIN RM Goal: Learn to give higher rewards to winners [2] Preferences ↳ A human reviews the two pairs and picks a "winner" ↳ (doc is, him) Embeddings ↳ This prompt has never received human feedback directly ↳ [S] is the special start symbol [11] Transformer ↳ Attention (yellow) ↳ Feed Forward (4x2 weight and bias matrix) ↳ Output: 3 "transformed" feature vector, one per position ↳ More details in my previous post 8. Transformer [] [12] Output Probabilities ↳ Apply a linear layer to map each transformed feature vector to a probability distribution over the vocabulary. [13] Sample ↳ Apply the greedy method, which is to pick the word with the highest score ↳ For output 1 and 2, the model accurately predicts the next word ↳ For 3rd output position, the model's predicts "him" [14] Reward Model ↳ The new pair (CEO is, him) is fed to the reward model ↳ The process is same as [3]-[6] ↳ Output: Reward = 3 [15] Loss Gradient ↳ We set the loss as the negative of the reward. ↳ The loss gradient is simply a constant -1. ↳ Run backpropagation and gradient descent to update LLM's weights and biases (red border)

Tom Yeh

79,916 views • 2 years ago

U-Net by hand ✍️ ~ 17 steps walkthrough below I consider U-Net as a key milestone in deep learning, the first image-to-image model that really worked! It came out of medical imaging, an unusual place, not from NeurIPS or CVPR or ACL. Now it is the backbone of diffusion models, which you see in almost all modern image generation models. I drew the network as a C so the matrix multiplication flows naturally down. Tilt your head to the right and it is a U again. 🤣 Goal: push a 3 x 16 image down to a 2 x 4 bottleneck and back out again, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = An image of three channels, R, G and B, sixteen pixels wide, and every kernel the network will use. = 2. Convolution 1 = Let us slide the first kernel over the image. Each output is one multiply-and-add over a 2 x 3 window, and the result is the green feature map. = 3. Find the maxima = We circle the largest value in each 1 x 2 window. Circling first is worth the extra step: it is the pooling decision, made before anything is written down. = 4. Max pool 1 = Let us copy those maxima down. Sixteen columns become eight, and half the detail is gone for good. = 5. Convolution 2 = We convolve again with the second kernel, deeper into the contracting path. The feature map is blue now. = 6. Find the maxima again = Same move as step 3, on the blue map. = 7. Max pool 2 = Eight columns become four. = 8. The bottleneck = Let us convolve once more. This is the bottom of the U, a 2 x 4 block that is everything the network kept. = 9. Spread it out = We start back up. The transposed convolution writes each bottleneck value into a wider grid, leaving gaps between them. = 10. Transposed convolution 1 = Let us fill those gaps by convolving over the spread-out grid. Four columns become eight. = 11. The first skip = We copy the encoder's matching row straight across. This is the skip connection, and it is the whole reason a U-Net can recover detail that pooling threw away. = 12. Convolution with the skip = Let us convolve the upsampled features together with the copied ones. = 13. Spread it out again = Same as step 9, one level up. = 14. Transposed convolution 2 = Eight columns become sixteen, back to the width we started at. = 15. The second skip = The encoder's first feature map comes across, the one made before any pooling happened. = 16. Convolution and ReLU = We convolve, then cross out every negative and set it to zero. = 17. Output convolution = Let us apply the last kernel. Out comes R', G' and B', an image the same size as the one we started with. The outputs: R' = [3, 0, 7, 0, 7, 0, 17, 0, 3, 0, 9, 0, 2, 0, 6, 0] G' = [1, 20, 1, 10, 1, 12, 1, 19, 2, 5, 1, 11, 1, 3, 1, 7] B' = [4, 20, 8, 10, 8, 12, 18, 19, 5, 5, 10, 11, 3, 3, 7, 7] Congrats! You just calculated a U-Net by hand. 💾 Save this post!
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U-Net by hand ✍️ ~ 17 steps walkthrough below I consider U-Net as a key milestone in deep learning, the first image-to-image model that really worked! It came out of medical imaging, an unusual place, not from NeurIPS or CVPR or ACL. Now it is the backbone of diffusion models, which you see in almost all modern image generation models. I drew the network as a C so the matrix multiplication flows naturally down. Tilt your head to the right and it is a U again. 🤣 Goal: push a 3 x 16 image down to a 2 x 4 bottleneck and back out again, filling in every cell yourself. = 1. Given = An image of three channels, R, G and B, sixteen pixels wide, and every kernel the network will use. = 2. Convolution 1 = Let us slide the first kernel over the image. Each output is one multiply-and-add over a 2 x 3 window, and the result is the green feature map. = 3. Find the maxima = We circle the largest value in each 1 x 2 window. Circling first is worth the extra step: it is the pooling decision, made before anything is written down. = 4. Max pool 1 = Let us copy those maxima down. Sixteen columns become eight, and half the detail is gone for good. = 5. Convolution 2 = We convolve again with the second kernel, deeper into the contracting path. The feature map is blue now. = 6. Find the maxima again = Same move as step 3, on the blue map. = 7. Max pool 2 = Eight columns become four. = 8. The bottleneck = Let us convolve once more. This is the bottom of the U, a 2 x 4 block that is everything the network kept. = 9. Spread it out = We start back up. The transposed convolution writes each bottleneck value into a wider grid, leaving gaps between them. = 10. Transposed convolution 1 = Let us fill those gaps by convolving over the spread-out grid. Four columns become eight. = 11. The first skip = We copy the encoder's matching row straight across. This is the skip connection, and it is the whole reason a U-Net can recover detail that pooling threw away. = 12. Convolution with the skip = Let us convolve the upsampled features together with the copied ones. = 13. Spread it out again = Same as step 9, one level up. = 14. Transposed convolution 2 = Eight columns become sixteen, back to the width we started at. = 15. The second skip = The encoder's first feature map comes across, the one made before any pooling happened. = 16. Convolution and ReLU = We convolve, then cross out every negative and set it to zero. = 17. Output convolution = Let us apply the last kernel. Out comes R', G' and B', an image the same size as the one we started with. The outputs: R' = [3, 0, 7, 0, 7, 0, 17, 0, 3, 0, 9, 0, 2, 0, 6, 0] G' = [1, 20, 1, 10, 1, 12, 1, 19, 2, 5, 1, 11, 1, 3, 1, 7] B' = [4, 20, 8, 10, 8, 12, 18, 19, 5, 5, 10, 11, 3, 3, 7, 7] Congrats! You just calculated a U-Net by hand. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

17,722 views • 1 month ago

SORA by Hand ✍️ OpenAI’s #SORA took over the Internet when it was announced earlier this year. The technology behind Sora is the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) developed by William Peebles and Shining Xie. How does DiT work? 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹: Generate a video conditioned by a text prompt and a series of diffusion steps [1] Given ↳ Video ↳ Prompt: "sora is sky" ↳ Diffusion step: t = 3 [2] Video → Patches ↳ Divide all pixels in all frames into 4 spacetime patches [3] Visual Encoder: Pixels 🟨 → Latent 🟩 ↳ Multiply the patches with weights and biases, followed by ReLU ↳ The result is a latent feature vector per patch ↳ The purpose is dimension reduction from 4 (2x2x1) to 2 (2x1). ↳ In the paper, the reduction is 196,608 (256x256x3)→ 4096 (32x32x4) [4] ⬛ Add Noise ↳ Sample a noise according to the diffusion time step t. Typically, the larger the t, the smaller the noise. ↳ Add the Sampled Noise to latent features to obtain Noised Latent. ↳ The goal is to purposely add noise to a video and ask the model to guess what that noise is. ↳ This is analogous to training a language model by purposely deleting a word in a sentence and ask the model to guess what the deleted word was. [5-7] 🟪 Conditioning by Adaptive Layer Norm [5] Encode Conditions ↳ Encode "sora is sky" into a text embedding vector [0,1,-1]. ↳ Encode t = 3 to as a binary vector [1,1]. ↳ Concatenate the two vectors in to a 5D column vector. [6] Estimate Scale/Shift ↳ Multiply the combined vector with weights and biases ↳ The goal is to estimate the scale [2,-1] and shift [-1,5]. ↳ Copy the result to (X) and (+) [7] Apply Scale/Sift ↳ Scale the noised latent by [2,-1] ↳ Shifted the scaled noised latent by [-1, 5] ↳ The result is "conditioned" noise latent. [8-10] Transformer [8] Self-Attention ↳ Feed the conditioned noised latent to Query-Key function to obtain a self-attention matrix ↳ Value is omitted for simplicity [9] Attention Pooling ↳ Multiply the conditioned noised latent with the self-attention matrix ↳ The result are attention weighted features [10] Pointwise Feed Forward Network ↳ Multiply the attention weighted features with weights and biases ↳ The result is the Predicted Noise 🏋️‍♂️ 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 [11] ↳ Calculate MSE loss gradients by taking the different between the Predicted Noise and the Sampled Noise (ground truth). ↳ Use the loss gradients to kick off backpropagation to update all learnable parameters (red borders) ↳ Note the visual encoder and decoder's parameters are frozen (blue borders) 🎨 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 (𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲) [12] Denoise ↳ Subtract the predicted noise from the noised latent to obtain the noise-free latent [13] Visual Decoder: Latent 🟩 → Pixels 🟨 ↳ Multiply the patches with weights and biases, followed by ReLU [14] Patches → Video ↳ Rearrange patches into a sequence of video frames.
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SORA by Hand ✍️ OpenAI’s #SORA took over the Internet when it was announced earlier this year. The technology behind Sora is the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) developed by William Peebles and Shining Xie. How does DiT work? 𝗚𝗼𝗮𝗹: Generate a video conditioned by a text prompt and a series of diffusion steps [1] Given ↳ Video ↳ Prompt: "sora is sky" ↳ Diffusion step: t = 3 [2] Video → Patches ↳ Divide all pixels in all frames into 4 spacetime patches [3] Visual Encoder: Pixels 🟨 → Latent 🟩 ↳ Multiply the patches with weights and biases, followed by ReLU ↳ The result is a latent feature vector per patch ↳ The purpose is dimension reduction from 4 (2x2x1) to 2 (2x1). ↳ In the paper, the reduction is 196,608 (256x256x3)→ 4096 (32x32x4) [4] ⬛ Add Noise ↳ Sample a noise according to the diffusion time step t. Typically, the larger the t, the smaller the noise. ↳ Add the Sampled Noise to latent features to obtain Noised Latent. ↳ The goal is to purposely add noise to a video and ask the model to guess what that noise is. ↳ This is analogous to training a language model by purposely deleting a word in a sentence and ask the model to guess what the deleted word was. [5-7] 🟪 Conditioning by Adaptive Layer Norm [5] Encode Conditions ↳ Encode "sora is sky" into a text embedding vector [0,1,-1]. ↳ Encode t = 3 to as a binary vector [1,1]. ↳ Concatenate the two vectors in to a 5D column vector. [6] Estimate Scale/Shift ↳ Multiply the combined vector with weights and biases ↳ The goal is to estimate the scale [2,-1] and shift [-1,5]. ↳ Copy the result to (X) and (+) [7] Apply Scale/Sift ↳ Scale the noised latent by [2,-1] ↳ Shifted the scaled noised latent by [-1, 5] ↳ The result is "conditioned" noise latent. [8-10] Transformer [8] Self-Attention ↳ Feed the conditioned noised latent to Query-Key function to obtain a self-attention matrix ↳ Value is omitted for simplicity [9] Attention Pooling ↳ Multiply the conditioned noised latent with the self-attention matrix ↳ The result are attention weighted features [10] Pointwise Feed Forward Network ↳ Multiply the attention weighted features with weights and biases ↳ The result is the Predicted Noise 🏋️‍♂️ 𝗧𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 [11] ↳ Calculate MSE loss gradients by taking the different between the Predicted Noise and the Sampled Noise (ground truth). ↳ Use the loss gradients to kick off backpropagation to update all learnable parameters (red borders) ↳ Note the visual encoder and decoder's parameters are frozen (blue borders) 🎨 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 (𝗦𝗮𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲) [12] Denoise ↳ Subtract the predicted noise from the noised latent to obtain the noise-free latent [13] Visual Decoder: Latent 🟩 → Pixels 🟨 ↳ Multiply the patches with weights and biases, followed by ReLU [14] Patches → Video ↳ Rearrange patches into a sequence of video frames.

Tom Yeh

238,409 views • 2 years ago

Dropout by hand ✍️ ~ 10 steps walkthrough below Dropout is the simplest trick in deep learning that actually works: during training you randomly switch neurons off, so the network cannot lean on any one of them. It is two lines of code and almost nobody has worked through what those lines do to the numbers. So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: train one pass through a small network with two dropout layers, then run inference with dropout switched off. The network: Linear(2,4), ReLU, Dropout(0.5), Linear(4,3), ReLU, Dropout(0.33), Linear(3,2). = 1. Given = A training set of two examples, X1 and X2, and the weight matrices for all three linear layers. = 2. Draw the first random numbers = Let us draw 4 random numbers, one per neuron in the first hidden layer. Above 0.5 we keep (◯), below we drop (╳). Here that gives [◯, ╳, ◯, ╳]. = 3. Build the first dropout matrix = We turn that pattern into a diagonal matrix. The scaling factor is 1/(1-p) = 2, so a kept neuron gets 2 and a dropped one gets 0. Multiplying by it does both jobs at once: it deletes the 2nd and 4th neurons and doubles the two that survive. = 4. Draw the second random numbers = Let us do it again for the 3 neurons in the next layer, this time against p = 0.33. The result is [◯, ◯, ╳]. = 5. Build the second dropout matrix = We set the diagonal to 1.5 where kept and 0 where dropped. Only the 3rd neuron goes. = 6. Feed forward = Let us run the whole thing top to bottom: one matrix multiplication per layer, ReLU setting the negatives to zero, and the two dropout matrices doing their work in between. The outputs Y come out at the bottom. = 7. MSE loss gradients = We compare Y against the targets Y', subtract, and multiply each element by 2. That is the whole gradient of the mean squared error. = 8. Update the weights = Let us push those gradients back through the network and update the weights (marked in light red). = 9. Deactivate dropout = Training is over, so we set both dropout matrices to the identity. Every neuron is back, and nothing is scaled. = 10. Feed forward again = One more pass, this time on unseen data, to make the prediction. You have just trained and run a network with dropout by hand. ✍️ The outputs: Training outputs Y = [-6, 9; 13, 4] Loss gradients = [-4, 4; 6, -2] Inference outputs = [13, 13; 4, 3] 💾 Save this post! #AIbyHand #Dropout #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks
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Dropout by hand ✍️ ~ 10 steps walkthrough below Dropout is the simplest trick in deep learning that actually works: during training you randomly switch neurons off, so the network cannot lean on any one of them. It is two lines of code and almost nobody has worked through what those lines do to the numbers. So I drew and calculated one entirely by hand. Goal: train one pass through a small network with two dropout layers, then run inference with dropout switched off. The network: Linear(2,4), ReLU, Dropout(0.5), Linear(4,3), ReLU, Dropout(0.33), Linear(3,2). = 1. Given = A training set of two examples, X1 and X2, and the weight matrices for all three linear layers. = 2. Draw the first random numbers = Let us draw 4 random numbers, one per neuron in the first hidden layer. Above 0.5 we keep (◯), below we drop (╳). Here that gives [◯, ╳, ◯, ╳]. = 3. Build the first dropout matrix = We turn that pattern into a diagonal matrix. The scaling factor is 1/(1-p) = 2, so a kept neuron gets 2 and a dropped one gets 0. Multiplying by it does both jobs at once: it deletes the 2nd and 4th neurons and doubles the two that survive. = 4. Draw the second random numbers = Let us do it again for the 3 neurons in the next layer, this time against p = 0.33. The result is [◯, ◯, ╳]. = 5. Build the second dropout matrix = We set the diagonal to 1.5 where kept and 0 where dropped. Only the 3rd neuron goes. = 6. Feed forward = Let us run the whole thing top to bottom: one matrix multiplication per layer, ReLU setting the negatives to zero, and the two dropout matrices doing their work in between. The outputs Y come out at the bottom. = 7. MSE loss gradients = We compare Y against the targets Y', subtract, and multiply each element by 2. That is the whole gradient of the mean squared error. = 8. Update the weights = Let us push those gradients back through the network and update the weights (marked in light red). = 9. Deactivate dropout = Training is over, so we set both dropout matrices to the identity. Every neuron is back, and nothing is scaled. = 10. Feed forward again = One more pass, this time on unseen data, to make the prediction. You have just trained and run a network with dropout by hand. ✍️ The outputs: Training outputs Y = [-6, 9; 13, 4] Loss gradients = [-4, 4; 6, -2] Inference outputs = [13, 13; 4, 3] 💾 Save this post! #AIbyHand #Dropout #DeepLearning #NeuralNetworks

Tom Yeh

14,442 views • 1 month ago

This Python script helps you better understand how embeddings work for SEO. Input a sentence + a query and BERT will calculate a content "Similarity Score": Search engines use embedding models to translate your content into numeric values. This is how they're able to mathematically determine whether a page on your site is actually relevant to a query someone is searching for. Once both the content and query are run through embeddings - they can calculate the "cosine similarity" or how similar the two entities are to each one. With this Python script, you can actually visualize how cosine similarity works for yourself. To you use you'll simply: 1. Save the Python script to a text file 2. Use your Terminal to run the script 3. You'll be prompted for both a "Sentence" and "Query" 4. Once entered, the script will calculate a "Similarity Score" between the text and query. This is how relevant your sentence is for the target keyword. By running this, you'll see that search engines are able to come with an calculation of content relevance. You'll need to think about the content on your site the same way - which sections have high scores and which ones have low ones? I've linked the Python script in the comments below. No coding knowledge is required and it walks you step by step on how to implement it.
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This Python script helps you better understand how embeddings work for SEO. Input a sentence + a query and BERT will calculate a content "Similarity Score": Search engines use embedding models to translate your content into numeric values. This is how they're able to mathematically determine whether a page on your site is actually relevant to a query someone is searching for. Once both the content and query are run through embeddings - they can calculate the "cosine similarity" or how similar the two entities are to each one. With this Python script, you can actually visualize how cosine similarity works for yourself. To you use you'll simply: 1. Save the Python script to a text file 2. Use your Terminal to run the script 3. You'll be prompted for both a "Sentence" and "Query" 4. Once entered, the script will calculate a "Similarity Score" between the text and query. This is how relevant your sentence is for the target keyword. By running this, you'll see that search engines are able to come with an calculation of content relevance. You'll need to think about the content on your site the same way - which sections have high scores and which ones have low ones? I've linked the Python script in the comments below. No coding knowledge is required and it walks you step by step on how to implement it.

Chris Long

13,185 views • 2 years ago

Variational Autoencoder by hand ✍️ ~ 11 steps walkthrough below A VAE learns the structure of your data, the mean and variance of its hidden features, and then generates new data from that structure. A GAN only learns to fool a discriminator. It can make convincing fakes without ever knowing what the data is really made of. That is the difference, and it is the whole reason VAEs matter. In 2024 ICLR gave its first ever Test of Time Award to the VAE paper, "Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes" by Diederik Kingma and Max Welling, ten years on. How does it work? Goal: encode three inputs into a distribution, sample from it, decode it back, and read every loss gradient off the page. = 1. Given = Three training examples X1, X2, X3, copied to the bottom as their own targets. Reconstructing your own input is what puts the "auto", meaning self, in autoencoder. = 2. Encoder, layer 1 = Let us multiply the inputs by weights and biases, then apply ReLU, crossing out every negative. = 3. Mean and standard deviation = We multiply the features by two more weight sets. The first predicts the means μ of the latent distributions, the second their standard deviations σ. = 4. A random offset = Let us sample ε from a standard normal, mean 0 and variance 1, and multiply it by σ. This is a random step away from the mean, scaled by how uncertain each feature is. = 5. Mean plus offset = We add the offset back onto μ, and these become the decoder's inputs. Keeping the randomness out in ε is the reparameterization trick: it lets gradients flow straight through the sampling. = 6. Decoder, layer 1 = Let us multiply by weights and biases and apply ReLU again. Here -4 is crossed out. = 7. Decoder, layer 2 = We multiply once more. The output Y is the decoder's attempt to rebuild X from the sampled distribution. = 8. Gradient for the mean = Let us push μ toward 0. A lot of math, the SGVB estimator, collapses the KL gradient to simply μ itself. = 9. Gradient for the standard deviation = We want σ to approach 1. = 10. And its formula = That same math simplifies the gradient to σ minus 1/σ. = 11. Reconstruction gradient = We want the reconstruction Y to match the input X. Mean squared error simplifies its gradient to Y minus X. Takeaway: the two gradients you just calculated each sit at the heart of a modern method, so one VAE teaches you both. The KL divergence is the penalty RLHF like GRPO uses to keep a fine-tuned model from drifting off its base. The reconstruction loss, plain mean squared error, is exactly what trains a diffusion model to denoise. Draw one VAE by hand and you have quietly learned the core of both. 💾 Save this post!
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Variational Autoencoder by hand ✍️ ~ 11 steps walkthrough below A VAE learns the structure of your data, the mean and variance of its hidden features, and then generates new data from that structure. A GAN only learns to fool a discriminator. It can make convincing fakes without ever knowing what the data is really made of. That is the difference, and it is the whole reason VAEs matter. In 2024 ICLR gave its first ever Test of Time Award to the VAE paper, "Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes" by Diederik Kingma and Max Welling, ten years on. How does it work? Goal: encode three inputs into a distribution, sample from it, decode it back, and read every loss gradient off the page. = 1. Given = Three training examples X1, X2, X3, copied to the bottom as their own targets. Reconstructing your own input is what puts the "auto", meaning self, in autoencoder. = 2. Encoder, layer 1 = Let us multiply the inputs by weights and biases, then apply ReLU, crossing out every negative. = 3. Mean and standard deviation = We multiply the features by two more weight sets. The first predicts the means μ of the latent distributions, the second their standard deviations σ. = 4. A random offset = Let us sample ε from a standard normal, mean 0 and variance 1, and multiply it by σ. This is a random step away from the mean, scaled by how uncertain each feature is. = 5. Mean plus offset = We add the offset back onto μ, and these become the decoder's inputs. Keeping the randomness out in ε is the reparameterization trick: it lets gradients flow straight through the sampling. = 6. Decoder, layer 1 = Let us multiply by weights and biases and apply ReLU again. Here -4 is crossed out. = 7. Decoder, layer 2 = We multiply once more. The output Y is the decoder's attempt to rebuild X from the sampled distribution. = 8. Gradient for the mean = Let us push μ toward 0. A lot of math, the SGVB estimator, collapses the KL gradient to simply μ itself. = 9. Gradient for the standard deviation = We want σ to approach 1. = 10. And its formula = That same math simplifies the gradient to σ minus 1/σ. = 11. Reconstruction gradient = We want the reconstruction Y to match the input X. Mean squared error simplifies its gradient to Y minus X. Takeaway: the two gradients you just calculated each sit at the heart of a modern method, so one VAE teaches you both. The KL divergence is the penalty RLHF like GRPO uses to keep a fine-tuned model from drifting off its base. The reconstruction loss, plain mean squared error, is exactly what trains a diffusion model to denoise. Draw one VAE by hand and you have quietly learned the core of both. 💾 Save this post!

Tom Yeh

17,011 views • 1 month ago

Scaled Dot-Product Attention by hand ✍️ I explained attention in my recent AI seminar as follows: Step 1 — Compare We take one token as a query and compare it against all keys using dot products. This gives us a grid of similarity scores: every query against every key. Step 2 — Scale We divide those scores by √dₖ to keep the values numerically stable. Step 3 — Normalize We apply softmax to turn raw scores into a probability distribution—values between 0 and 1 that sum to 1. These are the attention weights. Step 4 — Combine We use those weights to compute a weighted sum of the values. Each output token becomes a linear combination of all previous tokens—maybe 37% from one, 23% from another, and a little from the rest. No blackbox. Just dot products, scaling, softmax, and weighted sums—built one row at a time in Excel.
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Scaled Dot-Product Attention by hand ✍️ I explained attention in my recent AI seminar as follows: Step 1 — Compare We take one token as a query and compare it against all keys using dot products. This gives us a grid of similarity scores: every query against every key. Step 2 — Scale We divide those scores by √dₖ to keep the values numerically stable. Step 3 — Normalize We apply softmax to turn raw scores into a probability distribution—values between 0 and 1 that sum to 1. These are the attention weights. Step 4 — Combine We use those weights to compute a weighted sum of the values. Each output token becomes a linear combination of all previous tokens—maybe 37% from one, 23% from another, and a little from the rest. No blackbox. Just dot products, scaling, softmax, and weighted sums—built one row at a time in Excel.

Tom Yeh

31,114 views • 8 months ago

New short course on Building Applications with Vector Databases, taught by Pinecone’s Tim Tully! At the heart of a vector database is the ability to store a collection of vectors and then query against that, meaning input a new vector and find similar ones. This is useful for many AI applications. In this course, you'll learn how to use vector databases to build: (i) Semantic Search: Create a text search tool that goes beyond keyword matching, and instead focuses on the meaning of content. (ii) RAG (retrieval augmented generation): Enhance your LLM output by incorporating context from sources the model wasn't trained on. (iii) Recommender System: Combine semantic search and RAG to recommend topics, and demonstrate it with a news article recommender. (iv) Hybrid Search: Build an application that finds items using both images and descriptive text -- by combining both sparse and dense vector representations of the data -- using an eCommerce dataset as an example. (v) Image Similarity: Use image vector embeddings to create an app to compare facial features, using a database of public figures to determine the likeness between them. (vi) Anomaly Detection: Build an anomaly detection app that identifies unusual patterns in network communication logs. I hope you’ll enjoy learning how to build all these types of applications! Please sign up here:
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New short course on Building Applications with Vector Databases, taught by Pinecone’s Tim Tully! At the heart of a vector database is the ability to store a collection of vectors and then query against that, meaning input a new vector and find similar ones. This is useful for many AI applications. In this course, you'll learn how to use vector databases to build: (i) Semantic Search: Create a text search tool that goes beyond keyword matching, and instead focuses on the meaning of content. (ii) RAG (retrieval augmented generation): Enhance your LLM output by incorporating context from sources the model wasn't trained on. (iii) Recommender System: Combine semantic search and RAG to recommend topics, and demonstrate it with a news article recommender. (iv) Hybrid Search: Build an application that finds items using both images and descriptive text -- by combining both sparse and dense vector representations of the data -- using an eCommerce dataset as an example. (v) Image Similarity: Use image vector embeddings to create an app to compare facial features, using a database of public figures to determine the likeness between them. (vi) Anomaly Detection: Build an anomaly detection app that identifies unusual patterns in network communication logs. I hope you’ll enjoy learning how to build all these types of applications! Please sign up here:

Andrew Ng

137,169 views • 2 years ago