Attention Mechanisms are a key component in modern neural networks, particularly in natural language processing and computer vision tasks. They allow models to focus on specific parts of the input data when making predictions, effectively mimicking the human cognitive ability to concentrate on relevant information. The core idea is to compute a set of attention weights that determine the importance of different input elements. This can be mathematically represented as:
where is the query, is the key, is the value, and is the dimension of the key vectors. The softmax function ensures that the attention weights sum to one, allowing for a probabilistic interpretation of the focus. By combining these weights with the input values, the model can effectively prioritize information, leading to improved performance in tasks such as translation, summarization, and image captioning.
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