CS5720 - Week 11
Slide 214 of 220

Transformer Architecture - Overview

The Transformer architecture revolutionized NLP by replacing recurrence with self-attention, enabling unprecedented parallelization and performance.

"Attention is All You Need" - Vaswani et al., 2017

This groundbreaking architecture powers modern language models like BERT, GPT, and T5.

🎯

Multi-Head Attention

Parallel attention mechanisms that capture different relationships

🔄

Feed-Forward Networks

Position-wise fully connected layers for non-linear transformations

📍

Positional Encoding

Inject sequence order information without recurrence

⚖️

Layer Normalization

Stabilize training and improve convergence

Transformer Architecture

Encoder Stack

Multi-Head Self-Attention
Add & Normalize
Feed Forward
Add & Normalize
Stack N=6 times

Decoder Stack

Masked Self-Attention
Add & Normalize
Cross-Attention
Add & Normalize
Feed Forward
Add & Normalize
Stack N=6 times

Key Innovations

  • No recurrence - fully parallelizable
  • Self-attention captures long-range dependencies
  • Constant path length between any two positions
  • Multi-head attention learns diverse relationships
  • Scalable to very long sequences
Prepared by Dr. Gorkem Kar