# LexiMind Architecture ## Overview LexiMind couples a from-scratch Transformer implementation with a modern data and inference stack. The project consists of three major layers: 1. **Data & Tokenization** – HuggingFace tokenizer wrapper with tensor-aware batching and T5-specific decoder input preparation. 2. **Model Composition** – the bespoke encoder/decoder stack with task heads assembled via `MultiTaskModel`, plus `models.factory.build_multitask_model` to rebuild the network from configuration files. 3. **Inference & Serving** – a multi-task pipeline capable of summarization, emotion, and topic classification; surfaced through a CLI and Gradio UI. ## Custom Transformer Stack The custom Transformer is designed with **modern architectural choices** while maintaining compatibility with pre-trained weights from Google's **FLAN-T5**. ### Architecture Highlights - **Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN):** RMSNorm applied *before* each sublayer for stable training - **RMSNorm:** More efficient than LayerNorm (no mean computation, no bias parameters) - **FlashAttention:** Via PyTorch 2.0's `F.scaled_dot_product_attention` for O(N) memory - **Learned Positional Embeddings:** Trainable position representations (randomly initialized) - **Multi-Head Attention:** 12 heads with optional LoRA adapters and RoPE support ### Weight Loading from FLAN-T5 The `factory.py` module loads weights from FLAN-T5-base, which uses a compatible Pre-LN architecture: - **Token embeddings:** Shared between encoder and decoder - **Attention projections:** Q, K, V, O weights (bias initialized to zero since T5 has no attention bias) - **FFN weights:** `wi_1` → `linear1`, `wo` → `linear2` (T5 uses gated FFN; we use the up/down projections) - **RMSNorm weights:** Direct transfer (both use RMSNorm without bias) - **LM head:** Loaded from T5's `lm_head` **Note:** T5 uses *relative position bias* computed in attention, not absolute embeddings. Our learned positional embeddings are randomly initialized and train quickly during fine-tuning. ### File Structure - `src/models/encoder.py` – TransformerEncoder with Pre-LN RMSNorm blocks - `src/models/decoder.py` – TransformerDecoder with KV-cache for efficient generation - `src/models/attention.py` – Multi-Head Attention with FlashAttention, LoRA, and RoPE support - `src/models/heads.py` – ClassificationHead (mean pooling) and LMHead (with weight tying) - `src/models/multitask.py` – Routes inputs to task-specific heads - `src/models/factory.py` – Builds models and loads FLAN-T5 weights ## Data, Tokenization, and Datasets - `src/data/tokenization.py` wraps `AutoTokenizer` (configured for FLAN-T5) to provide tensor-aware batching and helper utilities for decoder input shifting. - `src/data/dataset.py` and `src/data/dataloader.py` define strongly typed dataset containers and task-specific collators. - `scripts/download_data.py` fetches and processes training data from HuggingFace datasets. ### Training Datasets | Task | Dataset | Size | Labels | | ---- | ------- | ---- | ------ | | Summarization | BookSum + arXiv | ~90K | Text→Summary | | Emotion | GoEmotions | ~43K | 28 emotions (multi-label) | | Topic | Books + Papers | ~50K | 8 categories (Fiction, Science, Technology, etc.) | | Books | Gutenberg (prose chunks) | ~30K | Literary text | ### T5 Tokenizer Differences - **Vocab size:** 32,128 tokens (SentencePiece) - **Special tokens:** pad=0, eos=1 (no explicit BOS; decoder starts with pad token) - **Subword tokenization:** Unigram-based (vs BART's BPE) ## Training Pipeline - `src/training/trainer.py` coordinates multi-task optimization with: - Mixed precision training (bfloat16 on Ampere/Ada GPUs) - Gradient accumulation for larger effective batch sizes - Per-task loss weighting and label smoothing - Early stopping based on validation loss - Cosine learning rate schedule with warmup - **torch.compile:** JIT compilation with Inductor backend for 20-40% speedup - Metrics in `src/training/metrics.py` include accuracy, multi-label F1, and ROUGE-like overlap ## Inference & Serving - `src/inference/pipeline.py` exposes summarization, emotion, and topic predictions with shared pre-processing, generation, and thresholding logic. - `src/inference/factory.py` rebuilds the full pipeline using the exported tokenizer artifact - The CLI (`scripts/inference.py`) drives the pipeline from the command line - Gradio demo (`scripts/demo_gradio.py`) provides an interactive web interface ## Key Decisions - **Custom Transformer + Pre-trained Weights:** Building from scratch demonstrates deep understanding while leveraging FLAN-T5's language knowledge - **Pre-LN RMSNorm:** Modern architecture used by LLaMA, T5 v1.1, and other 2023-2025 models - **Simplified Training:** Removed NaN detection and gradient monitoring (Windows workarounds no longer needed on WSL/Linux) - **Clean Dataset Pipeline:** AG News (4 clean categories) instead of Yahoo Answers (10 messy categories); BookSum for literary summarization - **Tokenizer Artifact Preference:** Inference favors `artifacts/hf_tokenizer` for reproducibility