Post
2275
TL;DR: The Story of Attention's Development by
@karpathy
Origin: First proposed in 2014 by @Dzmitry Bahdanau, @KyunghyunCho , and Yoshua Bengio in Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (1409.0473) . Inspired by cognitive processes and later renamed from "RNNSearch."
Key Idea: A data-dependent weighted average for pooling and communication, enabling flexible and powerful neural network connections.
Breakthrough: Bahdanau's "soft search" mechanism (softmax + weighted averaging) solved encoder-decoder bottlenecks in machine translation.
Transformer Revolution: Attention Is All You Need (1706.03762) (2017) by @ashishvaswanigoogle et al. simplified architectures by stacking attention layers, introducing multi-headed attention and positional encodings.
Legacy: Attention replaced RNNs, driving modern AI systems like ChatGPT. It emerged independently but was influenced by contemporaneous work like Alex Graves’s Neural Turing Machines (1410.5401) and Jason Weston’s Memory Networks (1410.3916) .
Attention to history: Jürgen Schmidhuber claims his 1992 Fast Weight Programmers anticipated modern attention mechanisms. While conceptually similar, the term “attention” was absent, and there’s no evidence it influenced Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio’s 2014 work. Paying attention (!) to history might have brought us to genAI earlier – but credit for the breakthrough still goes to Montreal.
Referenced Papers:
Attention Origin: Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (1409.0473)
Transformers: Attention Is All You Need (1706.03762)
Alex Graves' Work: Neural Turing Machines (1410.5401), Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks (1308.0850)
Jason Weston @spermwhale 's Memory Networks (1410.3916)
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (1409.3215) by Ilya Sutskever ( @ilyasut ), Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le
Who else deserves recognition in this groundbreaking narrative of innovation? Let’s ensure every contributor gets the credit they deserve. Leave a comment below 👇🏻🤗
Origin: First proposed in 2014 by @Dzmitry Bahdanau, @KyunghyunCho , and Yoshua Bengio in Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (1409.0473) . Inspired by cognitive processes and later renamed from "RNNSearch."
Key Idea: A data-dependent weighted average for pooling and communication, enabling flexible and powerful neural network connections.
Breakthrough: Bahdanau's "soft search" mechanism (softmax + weighted averaging) solved encoder-decoder bottlenecks in machine translation.
Transformer Revolution: Attention Is All You Need (1706.03762) (2017) by @ashishvaswanigoogle et al. simplified architectures by stacking attention layers, introducing multi-headed attention and positional encodings.
Legacy: Attention replaced RNNs, driving modern AI systems like ChatGPT. It emerged independently but was influenced by contemporaneous work like Alex Graves’s Neural Turing Machines (1410.5401) and Jason Weston’s Memory Networks (1410.3916) .
Attention to history: Jürgen Schmidhuber claims his 1992 Fast Weight Programmers anticipated modern attention mechanisms. While conceptually similar, the term “attention” was absent, and there’s no evidence it influenced Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio’s 2014 work. Paying attention (!) to history might have brought us to genAI earlier – but credit for the breakthrough still goes to Montreal.
Referenced Papers:
Attention Origin: Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (1409.0473)
Transformers: Attention Is All You Need (1706.03762)
Alex Graves' Work: Neural Turing Machines (1410.5401), Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks (1308.0850)
Jason Weston @spermwhale 's Memory Networks (1410.3916)
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (1409.3215) by Ilya Sutskever ( @ilyasut ), Oriol Vinyals, Quoc V. Le
Who else deserves recognition in this groundbreaking narrative of innovation? Let’s ensure every contributor gets the credit they deserve. Leave a comment below 👇🏻🤗