Transformers have modified the way in which synthetic intelligence works, particularly in understanding language and studying from knowledge. On the core of those fashions are tensors (a generalized sort of mathematical matrices that assist course of info) . As knowledge strikes by way of the completely different components of a Transformer, these tensors are topic to completely different transformations that assist the mannequin make sense of issues like sentences or pictures. Studying how tensors work inside Transformers may also help you perceive how immediately’s smartest AI methods truly work and suppose.
What This Article Covers and What It Doesn’t
✅ This Article IS About:
- The movement of tensors from enter to output inside a Transformer mannequin.
- Guaranteeing dimensional coherence all through the computational course of.
- The step-by-step transformations that tensors bear in numerous Transformer layers.
❌ This Article IS NOT About:
- A common introduction to Transformers or deep studying.
- Detailed structure of Transformer fashions.
- Coaching course of or hyper-parameter tuning of Transformers.
How Tensors Act Inside Transformers
A Transformer consists of two most important elements:
- Encoder: Processes enter knowledge, capturing contextual relationships to create significant representations.
- Decoder: Makes use of these representations to generate coherent output, predicting every ingredient sequentially.
Tensors are the elemental knowledge constructions that undergo these elements, experiencing a number of transformations that guarantee dimensional coherence and correct info movement.
Enter Embedding Layer
Earlier than coming into the Transformer, uncooked enter tokens (phrases, subwords, or characters) are transformed into dense vector representations by way of the embedding layer. This layer capabilities as a lookup desk that maps every token vector, capturing semantic relationships with different phrases.

For a batch of 5 sentences, every with a sequence size of 12 tokens, and an embedding dimension of 768, the tensor form is:
- Tensor form:
[batch_size, seq_len, embedding_dim] → [5, 12, 768]
After embedding, positional encoding is added, guaranteeing that order info is preserved with out altering the tensor form.

Multi-Head Consideration Mechanism
One of the essential elements of the Transformer is the Multi-Head Consideration (MHA) mechanism. It operates on three matrices derived from enter embeddings:
- Question (Q)
- Key (Okay)
- Worth (V)
These matrices are generated utilizing learnable weight matrices:
- Wq, Wk, Wv of form
[embedding_dim, d_model]
(e.g.,[768, 512]
). - The ensuing Q, Okay, V matrices have dimensions
[batch_size, seq_len, d_model]
.

Splitting Q, Okay, V into A number of Heads
For efficient parallelization and improved studying, MHA splits Q, Okay, and V into a number of heads. Suppose we now have 8 consideration heads:
- Every head operates on a subspace of
d_model / head_count
.

- The reshaped tensor dimensions are
[batch_size, seq_len, head_count, d_model / head_count]
. - Instance:
[5, 12, 8, 64]
→ rearranged to[5, 8, 12, 64]
to make sure that every head receives a separate sequence slice.

- So every head will get the its share of Qi, Ki, Vi

Consideration Calculation
Every head computes consideration utilizing the formulation:

As soon as consideration is computed for all heads, the outputs are concatenated and handed by way of a linear transformation, restoring the preliminary tensor form.


Residual Connection and Normalization
After the multi-head consideration mechanism, a residual connection is added, adopted by layer normalization:
- Residual connection:
Output = Embedding Tensor + Multi-Head Consideration Output
- Normalization:
(Output − μ) / σ
to stabilize coaching - Tensor form stays
[batch_size, seq_len, embedding_dim]

Feed-Ahead Community (FFN)
Within the decoder, Masked Multi-Head Consideration ensures that every token attends solely to earlier tokens, stopping leakage of future info.

That is achieved utilizing a decrease triangular masks of form [seq_len, seq_len]
with -inf
values within the higher triangle. Making use of this masks ensures that the Softmax operate nullifies future positions.

Cross-Consideration in Decoding
For the reason that decoder doesn’t absolutely perceive the enter sentence, it makes use of cross-attention to refine predictions. Right here:
- The decoder generates queries (Qd) from its enter (
[batch_size, target_seq_len, embedding_dim]
). - The encoder output serves as keys (Ke) and values (Ve).
- The decoder computes consideration between Qd and Ke, extracting related context from the encoder’s output.

Conclusion
Transformers use tensors to assist them study and make sensible selections. As the info strikes by way of the community, these tensors undergo completely different steps—like being changed into numbers the mannequin can perceive (embedding), specializing in necessary components (consideration), staying balanced (normalization), and being handed by way of layers that study patterns (feed-forward). These modifications maintain the info in the fitting form the entire time. By understanding how tensors transfer and alter, we will get a greater concept of how AI models work and the way they’ll perceive and create human-like language.