I’m implementing a seq2seq word based model with Attention to translate from English to Italian, but my Attention mechanism does’t seems to work well. I’m using GRU-RNN and the Attention mechanism uses the dot product.
I get good training loss going down exponentially from 3.5 to 0.8 reaching the plateau, but my results are not so good. Following there’s a typical attention matrix I get (all my results are vary similar to this one). x-axes = english sentence, y-axes = italian prediction. It seems that the model is able to align correctly the first word of the sentence, but then it just focus on the end of sequence “EOS” and doesn’t align anymore. Any suggestion??

I’ll show you my Decoder code:
class Decoder(nn.Module):
	def __init__(self):
		super(Decoder, self).__init__()

		self.attention = AttentionDot()
		self.embedding = nn.Embedding(PDec['output_size'], PEmb['embedding_size'], padding_idx=0)  # PDec['outputsize'] is because it is embedding the last word
		self.gru = nn.GRU(PDec['input_size'], PDec['hidden_size'], num_layers=PDec['num_layers'], batch_first=True, dropout=PDec['dropout'])
		self.out = nn.Linear(PDec['hidden_size'], PDec['output_size'])
		self.log_softmax = nn.LogSoftmax(dim=2)

	def forward(self, last_word_index, decoder_output, decoder_hidden, encoder_annotations, lengths):
		# getting attention weights over encoder_annotations
		focus_prob = self.attention(decoder_output, encoder_annotations, lengths) #[BxTx1]
		context = torch.bmm(focus_prob.transpose(1,2), encoder_annotations.transpose(0,1)) #[Bx1xT] bmm [BxTx2*H] = [Bx1x2*H]

		# concatenate context with last_char_index
		last_word_index = last_word_index.type(dtypeL).squeeze(1)
		last_word_index = self.embedding(last_word_index)
		dec_input = torch.cat((context, last_word_index),2) #[Bx1x(2*H+Emb)]

		decoder_output, decoder_hidden = self.gru(dec_input, decoder_hidden) # decoder_output = [Bx1xH], decoder_hidden = [num_layx1x(2*H+Emb)]
		unnormalize_log_prob = self.out(decoder_output) 
		prob = self.log_softmax(unnormalize_log_prob) # [Bx1xalpLen]

		return focus_prob, decoder_output, decoder_hidden, prob

	def initFirstInputIndex(self, batch_size):
		dec_in = L.SOS_token
		dec_in = Variable(torch.ones(batch_size, 1, 1).fill_(dec_in).type(dtypeF)) #[Bx1x1]
		return dec_in

	def InitFirstHidden(self, batch_size):
		hid = Variable(torch.zeros(PDec['num_layers'], batch_size, PEnc['hidden_size']).type(dtypeF))
		return hid

	def InitFirstOutput(self, batch_size):
		out = Variable(torch.ones(batch_size, 1, PDec['hidden_size']).type(dtypeF))
		return out

and the Attention one:
class AttentionDot(nn.Module):
    """
    attention with dot product
    """
    def __init__(self):
        super(AttentionDot, self).__init__()

        self.linear_enc = nn.Linear(PEnc['hidden_size']*PAtt['encoder_directions'], PAtt['attention_size'], bias=False)
        self.linear_dec = nn.Linear(PDec['hidden_size'], PAtt['attention_size'])

    def forward(self, decoder_state, encoder_annotations, lengths):
        att_decoder_state = self.linear_dec(decoder_state).transpose(1,2) #[BxAttx1]
        att_encoder_annotations = self.linear_enc(encoder_annotations).transpose(0,1) #[BxTxAtt]

        # attention scores
        scores = torch.bmm(att_encoder_annotations, att_decoder_state) #[BxTx1]

        # prob distribution over scores
        focus_prob = masked_stable_softmax(scores, lengths)

        return focus_prob  #[BxTx1]

def masked_stable_softmax(x, lengths):
    """
    masked softmax for batches with shifted unnormalize probabilities for stability.
    """

    # get ones where x values are non-zero
    mask_tensor = x.data != 0.
    mask = Variable(mask_tensor.type_as(x.data), requires_grad=False)

    # find max values and shift to deal with numerical instability
    maxes, _ = torch.max(x, dim=1, keepdim=True)
    shiftx = x - maxes

    # mask element's exp
    exps = torch.exp(shiftx) * mask

    # get sum of exps over every sample in the batch
    exps_sum = torch.sum(exps, dim=1).expand(exps.squeeze(2).size()).unsqueeze(2) + 0.0000001

    softmax = exps / exps_sum

    return softmax