BERT-base forward pass

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Initialize

$W_T \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{vocab size} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{\text{vocab size} \times 768} … \text{token embeddings}$

$W_P \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input length} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768} … \text{positional embeddings}$

$h \in \{1,…,n_{heads}\}, n_{heads}=12$

$l \in \{1,…,n_{layers}\}, n_{layers}=12$

$W_{h,l}^Q \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d_q} = \mathbb{R}^{768 \times 64} … \text{query weight matrices}$

$W_{h,l}^K \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d_k} = \mathbb{R}^{768 \times 64} … \text{key weight matrices}$

$W_{h,l}^V \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d_q} = \mathbb{R}^{768 \times 64} … \text{value weight matrices}$

$W_{l}^{ffnn} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d_{ffnn}} = \mathbb{R}^{768 \times 3072} … \text{feedforward layer’s weight matrix}$

$b_{l}^{ffnn} \in \mathbb{R}^{1 \times d_{ffnn}} = \mathbb{R}^{1 \times 3072} … \text{feedforward layer’s bias vector}$

$W_{l}^{out} \in \mathbb{R}^{d_{ffnn} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{3072 \times 768} … \text{output layer’s weight matrix}$

$b_{l}^{out} \in \mathbb{R}^{1 \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{1 \times 768} … \text{output layer’s bias vector}$

$W^{final} \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{768 \times 768} … \text{final layer’s weight matrix}$

$I=(i_{1},…,i_{512}) \in \mathbb{N}_{0}^{1 \times \text{max input length}} = \mathbb{N}_{0}^{1 \times 512} … \text{input vocab indices}$

$T=\texttt{lookup}(W_T,I) \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input length} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768} … \text{input token embeddings}$

$X = T + W_P \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input length} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768} … \text{input embeddings}$

$Z_0=X$

Forward algorithm (one step, not batched)

For $l \in \{1,…,n_{layers}\}, n_{layers}=12$:

For $h \in \{1,…,n_{heads}\}, n_{heads}=12$:

$Q_{h,l}=Z_{l-1} W_{h,l}^{Q} \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d_q} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 64} … \text{query matrix}$

$K_{h,l}=Z_{l-1} W_{h,l}^{K} \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d_k} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 64} … \text{key matrix}$

$V_{h,l}=Z_{l-1} W_{h,l}^{V} \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d_v} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 64} … \text{value matrix}$

$A_{h,l}=\texttt{Softmax}(\frac{Q_{h,l}K_{h,l}^T}{\sqrt{d_k}}) \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times \text{max input len}} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 512}$

$Z_{h,l}=A_{h,l}V_{h,l} \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d_v} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 64}$

$\tilde{Z}_l = \texttt{concat}(Z_{1,l},…,Z_{n_{heads},l}) \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times (d_v \cdot n_{heads})} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times (64 \cdot 12)} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768}$

$\bar{Z_l} = \texttt{LayerNorm}(Z_{l-1}+\tilde{Z_l}) \in \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768}$

$Z_l^{ffnn}=\max(0, \bar{Z_l}W_l^{ffnn}+b_l^{ffnn}) \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d_{ffnn}} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 3072}$

$Z_l^{out} = Z_l^{ffnn}W_l^{out} + b_l^{out} \in \mathbb{R}^{\text{max input len} \times d} = \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768}$

$Z_l = \texttt{LayerNorm}(\bar{Z_l}+Z_l^{out}) \in \mathbb{R}^{512 \times 768}$

Pass $\text{tanh}(W^{final}Z_{n_{layers}}[0,:])$ to the final $\texttt{Softmax}$ that predicts the class, where $Z_{n_{layers}}[0,:]$ is the hidden state corresponding to the first token.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Andriy Mulyar for pointing out a mistake in the layer normalization in the initial version of this post.

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