pytorch-seq2seq | Tutorials on implementing a few sequence-to-sequence | Translation library

In general, many answers are: it is different in different implementations. The original implementation from the paper is at https://github.com/lisa-groundhog/GroundHog/tree/master/experiments/nmt. For later implementations that reached better translation quality, you can check:

• Neural Monkey or Nematus in TensorFlow

• OpenNMT in PyTorch

• Marian in C++

Now to your points:

1. In the original paper, it was a zero vector. Later implementations use a projection of either of the encoder final state or the average of the encoder states. The argument for using average is that it propagates the gradients more directly into the encoder states. However, this decision does not seem to influence the translation quality much.

2. Maxout layer is a variant of a non-linear layer. It is sort of two ReLU layers in one: you do two independent linear projections and take the maximum of them. You can happily replace Maxout with ReLU (modern implementations do so), but you still should use dropout.

3. I don't know about any meaningful use case in MT when I would set the dropout rates differently. Note, however, that seq2seq models are used in many wild scenarios when it might make sense.

4. Most implementations do use bias when computing attention energies. If you use two linear layers, you will have the bias split into two variables. Biases are usually zero-initialized, they will thus get the same gradients and the same updates. However, you can always disable the bias in a linear layer.

5. Yes, if you want to initialize s₀ with the decoder states. In the attention mechanism, matrix U takes care of it.