Sequence modeling · 2017 · Ashish Vaswani et al.

Attention Is All You Need

Replace recurrence at the core of sequence transduction with parallel content-based interaction, while adding explicit position information.

The central move

Replace recurrence at the core of sequence transduction with parallel content-based interaction, while adding explicit position information.

Why it had to exist

Recurrent models forced a long sequential training path and made distant dependencies difficult. Existing attention still sat beside recurrent encoders and decoders.

Where it leads

Parallel self-attention → Transformers → BERT, GPT, multimodal models, and today’s language interfaces.

Study the guided reading in Bits →