2023/04/20 by Richard E. Turner, Turner, Richard E.
Computer Science · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Neural Networks and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.10557
openalex publication_date 2023/04/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and spatio-temporal modelling. There are many introductions to transformers, but most do not contain precise mathematical descriptions of the architecture and the intuitions behind the design choices are often also missing. Moreover, as research takes a winding path, the explanations for the components of the transformer can be idiosyncratic. In this note we aim for a mathematically precise, intuitive, and clean description of the transformer architecture. We will not discuss training as this is rather standard. We assume that the reader is familiar with fundamental topics in machine learning including multi-layer perceptrons, linear transformations, softmax functions and basic probability.