How do transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data?

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How do transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data?

Asked on Nov 03, 2025

Answer

Transformers handle sequential data differently from traditional neural networks by using self-attention mechanisms, which allow them to process entire sequences simultaneously rather than sequentially. This enables transformers to capture long-range dependencies more efficiently.

Example Concept: Transformers utilize a self-attention mechanism that assigns different attention scores to each part of the input sequence, allowing the model to weigh the importance of each element relative to others. This contrasts with traditional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that process data sequentially, which can lead to difficulties in capturing dependencies over long sequences due to vanishing gradient issues.

Additional Comment:

Transformers can parallelize processing, making them faster and more scalable than RNNs.
They use positional encoding to retain the order of sequences, as they do not inherently process data in sequence.
Transformers have become the backbone of many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing.

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How do transformers differ from traditional neural networks in handling sequential data?

Asked on Nov 03, 2025

Answer

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