How do transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data?
Asked on Nov 02, 2025
Answer
Transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data by using self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to process entire sequences simultaneously, rather than sequentially. This approach enables transformers to capture long-range dependencies more effectively.
Example Concept: Transformers use self-attention to weigh the importance of different parts of the input sequence, allowing them to process all elements simultaneously. In contrast, traditional neural networks like RNNs process data sequentially, which can lead to difficulties in capturing long-range dependencies due to their step-by-step nature.
Additional Comment:
- Transformers are highly parallelizable, which makes them faster to train on large datasets compared to RNNs.
- Self-attention in transformers helps in capturing contextual relationships between words in a sequence, regardless of their distance from each other.
- Transformers have become the backbone of many state-of-the-art NLP models, such as BERT and GPT.
- Traditional RNNs can suffer from vanishing gradient problems, which transformers mitigate through their architecture.
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