Techniques

Attention Mechanism

Definition

A neural network component that allows a model to dynamically focus on the most relevant parts of its input when producing each output element. Self-attention is the core innovation of the Transformer architecture and is responsible for LLMs' ability to handle long, complex contexts.

Related Terms

Transformer

The dominant neural network architecture for language, vision, and multimodal AI, introduced in the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper. Transformers use self-attention to process all tokens in parallel, enabling training on internet-scale data and powering every major LLM in use today.

Multi-Head Attention

An extension of the attention mechanism that runs multiple attention functions in parallel, allowing the model to attend to information from different representation subspaces simultaneously. Multi-head attention is a core component of every transformer-based model.

Context Window

The maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) an LLM can process in a single request, encompassing both the prompt and the generated output. Larger context windows—now exceeding 1 million tokens in some models—enable processing of long documents, codebases, and meeting transcripts in one pass.

Knowing the Terms Is Step One. Applying Them Is Step Two.

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