#ai #llm Created at 110723 # [Anonymous feedback](https://www.admonymous.co/louis030195) # [[Epistemic status]] #shower-thought Last modified date: 110723 Commit: 0 # Related # Self attention Imagine you and your friends are planning a road trip, and you all are suggesting places to visit. This situation can be likened to the input sentence in a self-attention mechanism, where each friend is a word in the sentence. **Self-Attention**: Now, not every friend's suggestion is equally important. Some friends are experts on road trips and have been to many places, so their suggestions carry more weight. On the other hand, some friends are not well-traveled, so their suggestions might not be as impactful. This is like the self-attention mechanism where each word in a sentence gets a certain level of 'attention' or importance based on its context in the sentence. For example, in the sentence "The cat sat on the mat", words like "cat" and "mat" might receive more attention because they are more relevant to understanding the sentence, whereas the word "the" might receive less attention as it is more common and carries less unique information. The final plan for the trip (like the understanding of the sentence in the transformer model) is not just a combination of every individual's suggestion, but a weighted combination where the opinions of some friends matter more than others. In this way, the self-attention mechanism in transformers allows the model to focus more on the important or relevant parts of the input when producing an output.