Introduction

A few years ago I contacted some researchers through AI-ON and started to help with Few Shot Music Generation project. My fork is located here.

During this work I found LSTMs basically eating my entire GPU resources ( a single GTX 1080 with 8GB or RAM) which in consequence started my path towards trying to cut down resources.

The main problem was the input domain, the one-hot vector was too big for the number of samples it was needed to process and I couldn’t make it work correctly. So I decided that the encoding needed some work.

The current work presents how to encode the entire MIDI vocabulary (4708 symbols) in a deterministic way to an embedding of 64 dimensions and be able to decode it later.

Even if the proposal I did for the Few Shot Music Generation was rejected the encoding did its work well for me allowing me to do some sequence training (although the project was harder than I expected)

Source Code and Analysis

Note: the page is not complete with all the conclusions, but does provide source code, some examples, a dimensionality analysis and gives the theoretical pointers to develop the subject further if wanted or needed to.

A page with the analysis

The notebook and source code of different tests is located in the minibrain repository.

Conclusion

It is possible to decide of smaller encodings that can be further embeddings by an input Fully Connected network (as is the current practice for input layers), given a smaller input instead of a one-hot vector provides an important resource reduction.

The decoding of such encodings can be done in two ways, either by a fully connected one-hot with softmax(as is the current practice), or by a similarity search.

Nevertheless big vocabularies in NLP have huge input encoding networks (the same for decoders), the work presented in the link given in the section Source Code and Analysis below started my in the path of deterministic dimensionality reduction for input encodings which I have explored more in depth since then and I currently work (when I have some time) in a universal text encoder that can handle any input language and there is no. I would like to publish a paper on the subject but even if I know it works for the things I’ve done I don’t have enough time to dedicate to this subject.

This work made a first spark in my head about the importance of dimensions on encoding and decoding layers and how to deal with it. I have been thinking and slowly working on this subject since then in some of my free time.