transformer-architecture-guide

Transformer Architecture Guide

Understand, implement, and adapt Transformer architectures for NLP, computer vision, and multimodal research, from the original attention mechanism to modern variants.

The Original Transformer

The Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017, "Attention Is All You Need") replaced recurrence and convolution with self-attention as the primary sequence modeling mechanism.

Core Components

| Component | Function | Key Parameters |

|-----------|----------|---------------|

| Multi-Head Self-Attention | Computes attention weights across all positions | d_model, n_heads, d_k, d_v |

| Feed-Forward Network | Position-wise nonlinear transformation | d_model, d_ff |

| Positional Encoding | Injects sequence order information | Sinusoidal or learned |

| Layer Normalization | Stabilizes training | Pre-norm or post-norm |

| Residual Connections | Enables gradient flow in deep networks | Add before or after norm |

Self-Attention Mechanism

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
import math

class MultiHeadAttention(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, d_model=512, n_heads=8):
        super().__init__()
        self.d_model = d_model
        self.n_heads = n_heads
        self.d_k = d_model // n_heads

        self.W_q = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
        self.W_k = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
        self.W_v = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)
        self.W_o = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)

    def forward(self, Q, K, V, mask=None):
        batch_size = Q.size(0)

        # Linear projections and reshape for multi-head
        Q = self.W_q(Q).view(batch_size, -1, self.n_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)
        K = self.W_k(K).view(batch_size, -1, self.n_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)
        V = self.W_v(V).view(batch_size, -1, self.n_heads, self.d_k).transpose(1, 2)

        # Scaled dot-product attention
        scores = torch.matmul(Q, K.transpose(-2, -1)) / math.sqrt(self.d_k)
        if mask is not None:
            scores = scores.masked_fill(mask == 0, -1e9)
        attn_weights = F.softmax(scores, dim=-1)
        context = torch.matmul(attn_weights, V)

        # Concatenate heads and project
        context = context.transpose(1, 2).contiguous().view(batch_size, -1, self.d_model)
        return self.W_o(context)

Complete Transformer Block

class TransformerBlock(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, d_model=512, n_heads=8, d_ff=2048, dropout=0.1):
        super().__init__()
        self.attention = MultiHeadAttention(d_model, n_heads)
        self.norm1 = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
        self.norm2 = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
        self.ffn = nn.Sequential(
            nn.Linear(d_model, d_ff),
            nn.GELU(),
            nn.Dropout(dropout),
            nn.Linear(d_ff, d_model),
            nn.Dropout(dropout)
        )
        self.dropout = nn.Dropout(dropout)

    def forward(self, x, mask=None):
        # Pre-norm architecture (GPT-style)
        attn_out = self.attention(self.norm1(x), self.norm1(x), self.norm1(x), mask)
        x = x + self.dropout(attn_out)
        ffn_out = self.ffn(self.norm2(x))
        x = x + ffn_out
        return x

Major Transformer Variants

Architecture Taxonomy

| Architecture | Type | Key Innovation | Representative Model |

|-------------|------|---------------|---------------------|

| Encoder-only | Bidirectional | Masked language modeling | BERT, RoBERTa |

| Decoder-only | Autoregressive | Causal language modeling | GPT, LLaMA, Claude |

| Encoder-Decoder | Seq2seq | Cross-attention between encoder and decoder | T5, BART, mBART |

Encoder-Only (BERT Family)

# BERT-style masked language modeling
from transformers import BertTokenizer, BertForMaskedLM

tokenizer = BertTokenizer.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")
model = BertForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("bert-base-uncased")

text = "The Transformer architecture has [MASK] natural language processing."
inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model(**inputs)

# Get predictions for [MASK]
mask_idx = (inputs.input_ids == tokenizer.mask_token_id).nonzero(as_tuple=True)[1]
logits = outputs.logits[0, mask_idx]
top_tokens = logits.topk(5).indices[0]
print([tokenizer.decode(t) for t in top_tokens])

Decoder-Only (GPT Family)

# GPT-style autoregressive generation
from transformers import GPT2LMHeadModel, GPT2Tokenizer

tokenizer = GPT2Tokenizer.from_pretrained("gpt2")
model = GPT2LMHeadModel.from_pretrained("gpt2")

prompt = "The key innovation of the Transformer is"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(
    **inputs,
    max_new_tokens=50,
    temperature=0.7,
    top_p=0.9,
    do_sample=True
)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Vision Transformers (ViT)

The Vision Transformer (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021) applies the Transformer to image classification:

class VisionTransformer(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, img_size=224, patch_size=16, in_channels=3,
                 d_model=768, n_heads=12, n_layers=12, n_classes=1000):
        super().__init__()
        self.patch_size = patch_size
        n_patches = (img_size // patch_size) ** 2

        # Patch embedding: split image into patches and project
        self.patch_embed = nn.Conv2d(in_channels, d_model,
                                     kernel_size=patch_size, stride=patch_size)

        # Learnable [CLS] token and position embeddings
        self.cls_token = nn.Parameter(torch.zeros(1, 1, d_model))
        self.pos_embed = nn.Parameter(torch.zeros(1, n_patches + 1, d_model))

        # Transformer blocks
        self.blocks = nn.ModuleList([
            TransformerBlock(d_model, n_heads) for _ in range(n_layers)
        ])

        self.norm = nn.LayerNorm(d_model)
        self.head = nn.Linear(d_model, n_classes)

    def forward(self, x):
        B = x.size(0)
        # Patchify and flatten
        x = self.patch_embed(x).flatten(2).transpose(1, 2)  # (B, n_patches, d_model)

        # Prepend CLS token
        cls = self.cls_token.expand(B, -1, -1)
        x = torch.cat([cls, x], dim=1)
        x = x + self.pos_embed

        # Transformer blocks
        for block in self.blocks:
            x = block(x)

        # Classification from CLS token
        x = self.norm(x[:, 0])
        return self.head(x)

Efficient Transformer Variants

| Method | Complexity | Key Idea | Reference |

|--------|-----------|----------|-----------|

| Standard attention | O(n^2) | Full pairwise attention | Vaswani et al., 2017 |

| Linear attention | O(n) | Kernel approximation of softmax | Katharopoulos et al., 2020 |

| Flash Attention | O(n^2) time, O(n) memory | IO-aware tiled computation | Dao et al., 2022 |

| Sparse attention | O(n sqrt(n)) | Fixed or learned sparse patterns | Child et al., 2019 |

| Sliding window | O(n * w) | Local attention window | Beltagy et al., 2020 (Longformer) |

| Multi-query attention | O(n^2) but faster | Shared K/V across heads | Shazeer, 2019 |

| Grouped-query attention | O(n^2) but faster | Groups of heads share K/V | Ainslie et al., 2023 |

Model Scaling Laws

Kaplan et al. (2020) and Hoffmann et al. (2022, "Chinchilla") established scaling laws:

Performance (loss) scales as a power law with:
- Model parameters (N): L ~ N^(-0.076)
- Dataset size (D): L ~ D^(-0.095)
- Compute budget (C): L ~ C^(-0.050)

Chinchilla optimal scaling:
- For compute budget C, allocate equally to model size and data
- Optimal tokens ~ 20 * parameters
- Example: 70B parameter model needs ~1.4T training tokens

Research Resources

| Resource | Description |

|----------|-------------|

| Hugging Face Transformers | Pre-trained models and fine-tuning framework |

| Papers With Code | Benchmarks, SOTA tracking, and code links |

| The Illustrated Transformer (Jay Alammar) | Visual explanations of attention |

| Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT | Minimal GPT implementation for education |

| EleutherAI | Open-source LLM research community |

| MLCommons | Standardized ML benchmarks (MLPerf) |