Tag Archives | attention

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The Transformer Model

We have already familiarized ourselves with the concept of self-attention as implemented by the Transformer attention mechanism for neural machine translation. We will now be shifting our focus to the details of the Transformer architecture itself to discover how self-attention can be implemented without relying on the use of recurrence and convolutions. In this tutorial, […]

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The Transformer Attention Mechanism

Before the introduction of the Transformer model, the use of attention for neural machine translation was implemented by RNN-based encoder-decoder architectures. The Transformer model revolutionized the implementation of attention by dispensing with recurrence and convolutions and, alternatively, relying solely on a self-attention mechanism.  We will first focus on the Transformer attention mechanism in this tutorial […]

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The Luong Attention Mechanism

The Luong attention sought to introduce several improvements over the Bahdanau model for neural machine translation, notably by introducing two new classes of attentional mechanisms: a global approach that attends to all source words and a local approach that only attends to a selected subset of words in predicting the target sentence.  In this tutorial, […]

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The Bahdanau Attention Mechanism

Conventional encoder-decoder architectures for machine translation encoded every source sentence into a fixed-length vector, regardless of its length, from which the decoder would then generate a translation. This made it difficult for the neural network to cope with long sentences, essentially resulting in a performance bottleneck.  The Bahdanau attention was proposed to address the performance […]

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A Tour of Attention-Based Architectures

As the popularity of attention in machine learning grows, so does the list of neural architectures that incorporate an attention mechanism. In this tutorial, you will discover the salient neural architectures that have been used in conjunction with attention. After completing this tutorial, you will better understand how the attention mechanism is incorporated into different […]

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The Attention Mechanism from Scratch

The attention mechanism was introduced to improve the performance of the encoder-decoder model for machine translation. The idea behind the attention mechanism was to permit the decoder to utilize the most relevant parts of the input sequence in a flexible manner, by a weighted combination of all the encoded input vectors, with the most relevant […]

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What Is Attention?

Attention is becoming increasingly popular in machine learning, but what makes it such an attractive concept? What is the relationship between attention applied in artificial neural networks and its biological counterpart? What components would one expect to form an attention-based system in machine learning? In this tutorial, you will discover an overview of attention and […]

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A Bird’s Eye View of Research on Attention

Attention is a concept that is scientifically studied across multiple disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, and, more recently, machine learning. While all disciplines may have produced their own definitions for attention, one core quality they can all agree on is that attention is a mechanism for making both biological and artificial neural systems more flexible.  In […]

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