How do transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data?
Asked on Oct 20, 2025
Answer
Transformers differ from traditional neural networks in their ability to handle sequential data by using self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to process entire sequences simultaneously rather than sequentially. This enables transformers to capture long-range dependencies more effectively.
Example Concept: Transformers use self-attention mechanisms to weigh the importance of different elements in a sequence, allowing them to consider the entire context at once. This contrasts with traditional RNNs, which process data sequentially and often struggle with long-range dependencies due to vanishing gradient issues.
Additional Comment:
- Transformers are highly parallelizable, making them faster to train on large datasets compared to RNNs.
- They use positional encodings to maintain the order of sequences since they do not inherently process data in sequence.
- Transformers have become the backbone of many state-of-the-art models in NLP, such as BERT and GPT.
- The architecture allows for better scalability with increased data and model size.
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