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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Turner, Richard E.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10557
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author Turner, Richard E.
author_facet Turner, Richard E.
contents The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and spatio-temporal modelling. There are many introductions to transformers, but most do not contain precise mathematical descriptions of the architecture and the intuitions behind the design choices are often also missing. Moreover, as research takes a winding path, the explanations for the components of the transformer can be idiosyncratic. In this note we aim for a mathematically precise, intuitive, and clean description of the transformer architecture. We will not discuss training as this is rather standard. We assume that the reader is familiar with fundamental topics in machine learning including multi-layer perceptrons, linear transformations, softmax functions and basic probability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2304_10557
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Introduction to Transformers
Turner, Richard E.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and spatio-temporal modelling. There are many introductions to transformers, but most do not contain precise mathematical descriptions of the architecture and the intuitions behind the design choices are often also missing. Moreover, as research takes a winding path, the explanations for the components of the transformer can be idiosyncratic. In this note we aim for a mathematically precise, intuitive, and clean description of the transformer architecture. We will not discuss training as this is rather standard. We assume that the reader is familiar with fundamental topics in machine learning including multi-layer perceptrons, linear transformations, softmax functions and basic probability.
title An Introduction to Transformers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10557