Introduction to Transformer Models
Chapter 1: Sequence Modeling and Attention Fundamentals
Challenges in Sequence-to-Sequence Tasks
Recap: Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)
Limitations of Traditional RNN Approaches
Introducing the Attention Mechanism Concept
Attention Score Calculation: A High-Level View
Context Vectors from Attention Weights
Quiz for Chapter 1
Chapter 2: Self-Attention and Multi-Head Attention
The Idea Behind Self-Attention
Query, and Value Vectors in Self-Attention
Scaled Dot-Product Attention Mechanism
Visualizing Self-Attention Scores
Introduction to Multi-Head Attention
How Multi-Head Attention Works
Benefits of Multiple Attention Heads
Hands-on Practical: Implementing Scaled Dot-Product Attention
Quiz for Chapter 2
Chapter 3: The Transformer Encoder-Decoder Architecture
Overall Architecture Overview
Input Embedding Layer
The Need for Positional Information
Positional Encoding Explained
The Encoder Stack
Add & Norm Layers (Residual Connections)
Position-wise Feed-Forward Networks
The Decoder Stack
Masked Multi-Head Self-Attention
Encoder-Decoder Attention Mechanism
Final Linear Layer and Softmax
Hands-on Practical: Building an Encoder Layer
Quiz for Chapter 3
Chapter 4: Training and Implementing Transformers
Data Preparation: Tokenization
Creating Input Batches
Loss Functions for Sequence Tasks
Optimization Strategies
Regularization Techniques
Overview of a Basic Implementation
Using Pre-trained Model Libraries (Brief)
Practice: Assembling a Basic Transformer
Quiz for Chapter 4
The Decoder Stack
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- Attention Is All You Need, Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin, 2017 Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Vol. 30 (Curran Associates, Inc.) DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.1706.03762 - This foundational paper introduces the Transformer architecture, detailing the decoder's components and their functions, including masked self-attention and encoder-decoder attention.
- Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft), Daniel Jurafsky, James H. Martin, 2025 - A comprehensive academic treatment of natural language processing, including a detailed discussion of the Transformer architecture and its decoder stack.
- Natural Language Processing with Transformers, Lewis Tunstall, Leandro von Werra, and Thomas Wolf, 2022 (O'Reilly Media) - Offers practical guidance on using Transformer models, with clear explanations of their architecture, including the decoder's role and sub-layers.
- The Illustrated Transformer, Jay Alammar, 2018 - Uses diagrams and visuals to explain the Transformer architecture, making the decoder components and their interactions accessible and easy to grasp.