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Exploding gradient

As explained in LLMs in Production

An exploding gradient is a training condition in which propagated derivatives grow excessively large and destabilize optimization.

An exploding gradient occurs when sequence processing makes propagated derivatives excessively large, destabilizing optimization and making deep recurrent neural networks difficult to train. section 2.2.7

Sequence-length distortion

Compare “I loved the movie last night” with a much longer, semantically similar sentence. An RNN can assign different sentiment because sequence processing amplifies length-dependent effects, illustrating how exploding gradients complicate training. section 2.2.7

LSTMs address this failure mode with memory cells and gating mechanisms for variable-length sequences. Bidirectional LSTMs concatenate outputs from forward and backward RNNs, improving access to information across long sequences. section 2.2.7

Listing 2.7 RNN and LSTM PyTorch class implementations
import torch
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from gensim.models import Word2Vec
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
import nltk
import spacy

    tokenizer = nltk.tokenize.RegexpTokenizer("\w+'?\w+|\w+'")
    tokenizer.tokenize("This is a test")
    stop_words = nltk.corpus.stopwords.words("english")
    nlp = spacy.load("en_core_web_lg", disable=["parser", "tagger", "ner"])

dataset = pd.read_csv("./data/twitter.csv")     #1

text_data = list(
    map(lambda x: tokenizer.tokenize(x.lower()), dataset["text"])
)
text_data = [
    [token.lemma_ for word in text for token in nlp(word)]
    for text in text_data
]
label_data = list(map(lambda x: x, dataset["feeling"]))
assert len(text_data) == len(
    label_data
), f"{len(text_data)} does not equal {len(label_data)}"

EMBEDDING_DIM = 100
model = Word2Vec(
    text_data, vector_size=EMBEDDING_DIM, window=5, min_count=1, workers=4
)
word_vectors = model.wv
print(f"Vocabulary Length: {len(model.wv)}")
del model

padding_value = len(word_vectors.index_to_key)
    embedding_weights = torch.Tensor(word_vectors.vectors)    #2


class RNN(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(
        self,
        input_dim,
        embedding_dim,
        hidden_dim,
        output_dim,
        embedding_weights,
    ):
        super().__init__()
        self.embedding = torch.nn.Embedding.from_pretrained(
            embedding_weights
    )
    self.rnn = torch.nn.RNN(embedding_dim, hidden_dim)
    self.fc = torch.nn.Linear(hidden_dim, output_dim)

    def forward(self, x, text_lengths):
        embedded = self.embedding(x)
        packed_embedded = torch.nn.utils.rnn.pack_padded_sequence(
            embedded, text_lengths
        )
        packed_output, hidden = self.rnn(packed_embedded)
        output, output_lengths = torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_packed_sequence(
            packed_output
        )
        return self.fc(hidden.squeeze(0))


INPUT_DIM = padding_value
EMBEDDING_DIM = 100
HIDDEN_DIM = 256
OUTPUT_DIM = 1

rnn_model = RNN(
    INPUT_DIM, EMBEDDING_DIM, HIDDEN_DIM, OUTPUT_DIM, embedding_weights
)

rnn_optimizer = torch.optim.SGD(rnn_model.parameters(), lr=1e-3)
rnn_criterion = torch.nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss()
device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")


class LSTM(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(
    self,
    input_dim,
    embedding_dim,
    hidden_dim,
    output_dim,
    n_layers,
    bidirectional,
        dropout,
        embedding_weights,
    ):
        super().__init__()
        self.embedding = torch.nn.Embedding.from_pretrained(
            embedding_weights
        )
        self.rnn = torch.nn.LSTM(
            embedding_dim,
            hidden_dim,
            num_layers=n_layers,
            bidirectional=bidirectional,
            dropout=dropout,
        )
        self.fc = torch.nn.Linear(hidden_dim * 2, output_dim)
        self.dropout = torch.nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x, text_lengths):
        embedded = self.embedding(x)
        packed_embedded = torch.nn.utils.rnn.pack_padded_sequence(
            embedded, text_lengths
        )
        packed_output, (hidden, cell) = self.rnn(packed_embedded)
        hidden = self.dropout(
            torch.cat((hidden[-2, :, :], hidden[-1, :, :]), dim=1)
        )
        return self.fc(hidden.squeeze(0))


INPUT_DIM = padding_value
EMBEDDING_DIM = 100
HIDDEN_DIM = 256
OUTPUT_DIM = 1
N_LAYERS = 2
BIDIRECTIONAL = True
DROPOUT = 0.5

lstm_model = LSTM(
    INPUT_DIM,
    EMBEDDING_DIM,
    HIDDEN_DIM,
    OUTPUT_DIM,
    N_LAYERS,
    BIDIRECTIONAL,
    DROPOUT,
    embedding_weights,
)

lstm_optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(lstm_model.parameters())
lstm_criterion = torch.nn.BCEWithLogitsLoss()
device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")


def binary_accuracy(preds, y):
    rounded_preds = torch.round(torch.sigmoid(preds))
    correct = (rounded_preds == y).float()
    acc = correct.sum() / len(correct)
    return acc


def train(model, iterator, optimizer, criterion):
    epoch_loss = 0
    epoch_acc = 0
    model.train()
    for batch in iterator:
        optimizer.zero_grad()
        predictions = model(batch["text"], batch["length"]).squeeze(1)
        loss = criterion(predictions, batch["label"])
        acc = binary_accuracy(predictions, batch["label"])
        loss.backward()
        optimizer.step()
        epoch_loss += loss.item()
        epoch_acc += acc.item()

    return epoch_loss / len(iterator), epoch_acc / len(iterator)


def evaluate(model, iterator, criterion):
    epoch_loss = 0
    epoch_acc = 0
    model.eval()
    with torch.no_grad():
        for batch in iterator:
            predictions = model(batch["text"], batch["length"]).squeeze(1)
            loss = criterion(predictions, batch["label"])
            acc = binary_accuracy(predictions, batch["label"])

            epoch_loss += loss.item()
            epoch_acc += acc.item()

    return epoch_loss / len(iterator), epoch_acc / len(iterator)


batch_size = 2     #3


def iterator(X, y):
    size = len(X)
    permutation = np.random.permutation(size)
    iterate = []
    for i in range(0, size, batch_size):
    indices = permutation[i : i + batch_size]
        batch = {}
        batch["text"] = [X[i] for i in indices]
        batch["label"] = [y[i] for i in indices]

        batch["text"], batch["label"] = zip(
            *sorted(
                zip(batch["text"], batch["label"]),
                key=lambda x: len(x[0]),
                reverse=True,
            )
        )
        batch["length"] = [len(utt) for utt in batch["text"]]
        batch["length"] = torch.IntTensor(batch["length"])
        batch["text"] = torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            batch["text"], batch_first=True
        ).t()
        batch["label"] = torch.Tensor(batch["label"])

        batch["label"] = batch["label"].to(device)
        batch["length"] = batch["length"].to(device)
        batch["text"] = batch["text"].to(device)

        iterate.append(batch)

    return iterate


index_utt = [
    torch.tensor([word_vectors.key_to_index.get(word, 0) for word in text])
    for text in text_data
]

X_train, X_test, y_train, y_test = train_test_split(
    index_utt, label_data, test_size=0.2
)                                                    #4
X_train, X_val, y_train, y_val = train_test_split(
    X_train, y_train, test_size=0.2
)

train_iterator = iterator(X_train, y_train)
validate_iterator = iterator(X_val, y_val)
test_iterator = iterator(X_test, y_test)

print(len(train_iterator), len(validate_iterator), len(test_iterator))


N_EPOCHS = 25

for model in [rnn_model, lstm_model]:
    print(
    "|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|"
    )
    print(f"Training with {model.__class__.__name__}")
    if "RNN" in model.__class__.__name__:
        for epoch in range(N_EPOCHS):
            train_loss, train_acc = train(
                rnn_model, train_iterator, rnn_optimizer, rnn_criterion
            )
            valid_loss, valid_acc = evaluate(
                rnn_model, validate_iterator, rnn_criterion
            )

            print(
                f"| Epoch: {epoch+1:02} | Train Loss: {train_loss: .3f} | 
                 Train Acc: {train_acc*100: .2f}% | Validation Loss: 
                 {valid_loss: .3f} | Validation Acc: {valid_acc*100: .2f}% |"
            )
    else:
        for epoch in range(N_EPOCHS):
            train_loss, train_acc = train(
                lstm_model, train_iterator, lstm_optimizer, lstm_criterion
            )
            valid_loss, valid_acc = evaluate(
                lstm_model, validate_iterator, lstm_criterion
            )

            print(
                f"| Epoch: {epoch+1:02} | Train Loss: {train_loss: .3f} | 
                 Train Acc: {train_acc*100: .2f}% | Validation Loss: 
                 {valid_loss: .3f} | Validation Acc: {valid_acc*100: .2f}% |"
            )
# Training on our dataset
# | Epoch: 01 | Train Loss:  0.560 | Train Acc:  70.63% | Validation Loss:
# 0.574 | Validation Acc:  70.88% |
# | Epoch: 05 | Train Loss:  0.391 | Train Acc:  82.81% | Validation Loss:
# 0.368 | Validation Acc:  83.08% |
# | Epoch: 10 | Train Loss:  0.270 | Train Acc:  89.11% | Validation Loss:
# 0.315 | Validation Acc:  86.22% |
# | Epoch: 15 | Train Loss:  0.186 | Train Acc:  92.95% | Validation Loss:
# 0.381 | Validation Acc:  87.49% |
# | Epoch: 20 | Train Loss:  0.121 | Train Acc:  95.93% | Validation Loss:
# 0.444 | Validation Acc:  86.29% |
# | Epoch: 25 | Train Loss:  0.100 | Train Acc:  96.28% | Validation Loss:
# 0.451 | Validation Acc:  86.83% |

Inspect the paired PyTorch RNN and LSTM implementations used for a Twitter sentiment workflow, including tokenization, embeddings, and variable-length sequence preparation. section 2.2.7

How LLMs in Production covers it

How deep it goes
Defines the failure mode and demonstrates its sequence-length consequence, but does not detail derivative calculations or direct stabilization procedures.
Examples
Uses paired sentiment sentences and PyTorch RNN/LSTM implementations trained on Twitter sentiment data.
What it assumes
Assumes familiarity with sequence processing and recurrent neural networks while introducing the associated gradient failure modes.
What you can do after
Understand how exploding gradients destabilize recurrent training and why LSTM memory cells and gates provide an alternative.
How it connects
Connects exploding gradients with recurrent neural networks, vanishing gradients, LSTMs, memory cells, and gating mechanisms.

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