Transformers: Ditching Recurrence for Attention in Machine Translation

Overview

Paper Summary › Explain Like I'm Five › Conflicts of Interest › Identified Limitations › Rating Explanation › Good to know › Topic Hierarchy › File Information ›

Paper Summary

Paperzilla title

This paper introduces the Transformer, a novel neural network architecture based solely on attention mechanisms, eliminating recurrence and convolutions for sequence transduction tasks like machine translation. It demonstrates superior performance and parallelization compared to recurrent or convolutional models on English-German and English-French translation tasks.

Explain Like I'm Five

Imagine translating languages by focusing on the relationships between words, rather than processing them one by one. Transformers do this using "attention," making translation faster and more accurate.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

The authors were employed by Google at the time of publication, which may present a conflict of interest regarding the promotion of their research and technologies.

Identified Limitations

Positional Encoding Limitations

While the sinusoidal positional encoding allows extrapolation beyond training sequence lengths, its effectiveness for extremely long sequences remains to be fully explored. Alternative encoding methods could potentially offer advantages in specific contexts.

Computational Cost of Self-Attention

Although computationally efficient for typical sequence lengths, the computational complexity of self-attention scales quadratically with sequence length, posing potential challenges for extremely long sequences.

Lack of Explicit Linguistic Structure

The Transformer relies entirely on attention mechanisms to capture dependencies between words, lacking explicit modeling of linguistic structures such as syntax trees. This might limit its ability to handle certain complex linguistic phenomena.

Rating Explanation

This paper introduced a highly influential and impactful architecture for sequence transduction, significantly advancing the field of machine translation and natural language processing. While some limitations exist, its strengths and overall impact warrant a strong rating.

Good to know

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Topic Hierarchy

Domain: Physical Sciences

Field: Computer Science

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

File Information

Original Title: Attention is All You Need

Uploaded: September 17, 2025 at 05:44 AM

Privacy: Public