Attention Mechanism Explained For Kids

The 2017 paper “Attention is All You Need” introduced a groundbreaking approach to AI, namely the so-called “sequence transduction tasks”. Let’s explain all this in simple terms.

[image by Author / Grok]

A Little Info Upfront

Name: “Attention is All You Need” (Get the PDF here)

Authors: researchers at Google Brain and Google Research, incl. Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer

Subject: the Transformer, a novel neural network architecture that revolutionized the field of natural language processing.

Ok, here we go.

Imagine you’re trying to translate a sentence from English to French.

The Transformer is like a super-smart robot that can do this really well and really fast.

Here’s how it works:

1. Instead of reading the sentence word by word like older robots, the Transformer looks at the whole sentence at once.
2. It has special “attention” abilities, like multiple pairs of eyes, that can focus on different parts of the sentence at the same time.
3. These “eyes” help it understand how words relate to each other, even if they’re far apart in the sentence.
4. The Transformer has two main parts: one that reads the English sentence, and another that writes the French sentence.
5. As it’s writing in French, it keeps looking back at the English sentence to make sure it’s getting everything right.
6. It also remembers the order of the words by giving each word a special number tag.
7. The Transformer can learn and improve much faster than older robots because it can do many things at the same time, instead of one after another.
8. When tested, this robot was able to translate sentences better and faster than any other robot before it.
9. The scientists who created the Transformer think it could be used for lots of other tasks too, not just translating languages.

So in simple terms, the Transformer is like a super-efficient, multi-tasking robot that can understand and translate languages really well by looking at whole sentences and focusing on many parts at once.

The Transformer’s Internal Monologue

Let’s turn this whole process into an internal monologue.

This is what a Transformer would think if it were human:

“Alright, new sentence incoming! Let’s see… ‘The cat sat on the mat.’ Got it all at once. No need to go word by word like the old days.

Now, attention team, activate! Eyes one through eight, spread out! Eye one, focus on ‘cat.’ Eye two, check out ‘mat.’ Eyes three and four, look at ‘sat’ and ‘on.’ You other eyes, scan for any tricky bits.

Hmm, ‘cat’ and ‘mat’… they’re far apart but they rhyme. That might be important. And ‘sat on’ goes together. Got it!

Okay, English understanding team, you’ve done your job. French writing team, you’re up! Let’s see… ‘Le chat…’ Wait, better double-check the English. Yep, ‘The cat.’ Good start.

‘…s’est assis…’ Looking back again. ‘Sat,’ check. ‘…sur le tapis.’ One more glance at the English. ‘On the mat.’ Perfect!

Don’t forget to tag each word with its position. We don’t want a jumbled mess!

Wow, that was quick! And I did it all at once instead of bit by bit. No wonder I’m faster than the old models.

You know, I bet I could do more than just translate. With all these attention eyes and quick thinking, I could probably write stories, answer questions, or even code! I wonder what the scientists will have me do next?”

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