Your understanding of the attention mechanism is on the right track. In the context of your LSTM model, the attention layer is indeed about assigning weights to the LSTM output before feeding it into the final linear layer. The weights in this context are learned parameters that help the model focus on more relevant parts of the input sequence.

Regarding the implementation of your attention layer, I've noticed a few aspects that might need adjustment. The attention mechanism typically involves a query-key-value framework, even in self-attention scenarios where these are derived from the same source. Here's a revised version of the attention layer using PyTorch, tailored for self-attention:

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F

class SelfAttentionLayer(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, feature_size):
        super(SelfAttentionLayer, self).__init__()
        self.feature_size = feature_size

        # Linear transformations for Q, K, V from the same source
        self.key = nn.Linear(feature_size, feature_size)
        self.query = nn.Linear(feature_size, feature_size)
        self.value = nn.Linear(feature_size, feature_size)

    def forward(self, x, mask=None):
        # Apply linear transformations
        keys = self.key(x)
        queries = self.query(x)
        values = self.value(x)

        # Scaled dot-product attention
        scores = torch.matmul(queries, keys.transpose(-2, -1)) / torch.sqrt(torch.tensor(self.feature_size, dtype=torch.float32))

        # Apply mask (if provided)
        if mask is not None:
            scores = scores.masked_fill(mask == 0, -1e9)

        # Apply softmax
        attention_weights = F.softmax(scores, dim=-1)

        # Multiply weights with values
        output = torch.matmul(attention_weights, values)

        return output, attention_weights

This implementation provides a more standard approach to self-attention, which may enhance your model's capability to focus on relevant features within the LSTM output. The feature_size should be set according to your LSTM's output features. In your case, if the LSTM output is (batch_size, 256), then feature_size would be 256.