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Library/ Writing/Tagged “transformers”

Tagged “transformers”

13 posts.

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All Model Architecture19 Training & Alignment22 Inference & Serving18 Agents & Orchestration11 Reasoning & Evaluation26 Safety, Security & Governance7 Platforms & Practice20
Inference & Serving 21 min

Diffusion Language Models: Writing Text by Denoising, Not Predicting the Next Token

Autoregressive models write left to right, one token at a time. Diffusion language models reveal a whole sequence at once and sharpen it over a handful of steps. That single change rewrites the latency math, and in 2025 it stoppe…

diffusion-models llm parallel-decoding generative-ai ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 20 min

Do Transformers Need Three Projections? Rethinking Q, K, and V

Every attention head learns three weight matrices for query, key, and value. A 2026 study trained models up to 1.2B parameters to ask which of them are actually load-bearing, and found that keys and values can share one projectio…

transformers attention kv-cache inference ∑ ◫
Inference & Serving 21 min

FlashAttention and the Memory Wall: Why Attention Was Never Compute-Bound

An A100 can execute 312 trillion half-precision operations per second but can only pull about 2 terabytes from memory in that same second. FlashAttention made attention fast not by computing less, but by refusing to touch memory.

flashattention gpu attention transformers ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 21 min

From 4K to a Million Tokens: How RoPE Scaling, YaRN, and Ring Attention Stretch the Context Window

A model trained on 4,096 tokens can be coaxed into reading a quarter-million without retraining from scratch. The trick is not bigger attention; it is lying to the model about position, and splitting the sequence across a ring of GPUs.

long-context rope yarn ring-attention ∑ ◫
Reasoning & Evaluation 23 min

From Features to Circuits: What Attribution Graphs Explain, and the Fraction They Do Not

Swap the Texas features for British Columbia and Claude answers Victoria instead of Austin. That single intervention is the strongest evidence yet that a language model performs genuine multi-step reasoning inside one forward pas…

interpretability mech-interp safety alignment ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 20 min

Half Mamba, Half Attention: Why Hybrid State-Space Models Took Over

Pure Mamba was supposed to replace attention. Instead the most efficient open models in 2025 are roughly seven-eighths Mamba and one-eighth attention. The reason is the KV cache, and what each layer can and cannot remember.

state-space-models mamba transformers long-context ∑ ◫
Reasoning & Evaluation 23 min

Latent Reasoning: Teaching Language Models to Think Without Tokens

Chain-of-thought made models reason out loud, one word at a time. A new line of work lets them reason in the silent space between words, trading auditability for compute that does not have to be spelled out.

latent-reasoning chain-of-thought test-time-compute reasoning ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 25 min

Learned Weather Forecasting: What Neural Networks Replaced, and What They Did Not

A 36.7-million-parameter graph network produces a 10-day global forecast in under a minute and beats the world's best physics-based system on 90 percent of verification targets. It also cannot start without that system's data ass…

ai-for-science weather diffusion graph-neural-networks ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 25 min

Mixture of Experts: How Frontier LLMs Achieve Scale Without Proportional Cost

Every frontier LLM released since 2023 uses some form of Mixture of Experts. The idea is deceptively simple: build a model with hundreds of billions of parameters but activate only a fraction for each token. The result is dense-m…

moe architecture scaling inference ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 22 min

Multi-Head Latent Attention: How DeepSeek Compressed the KV Cache Without Losing Quality

Every token an LLM generates forces it to reload the keys and values of every token that came before. Multi-Head Latent Attention rewrites that trade by caching one compressed vector instead of dozens of separate heads, cutting m…

llm-architecture attention-mechanisms deepseek kv-cache ∑ ◫
Model Architecture 4 min

The Length of a Thought: Why Context Windows Became the New Battleground

A 512-token model could read a paragraph. A million-token model can read a novel. The journey between those two numbers is a story about quadratic cost, clever approximations, and what it means for a machine to "remember."

transformers attention context scaling
Model Architecture 32 min

The Wavelength Problem: How One Number Decides a Model's Context Length

Llama 2 and Llama 3 share an attention implementation almost line for line. One constant differs: the RoPE base went from 10,000 to 500,000. That number sets the entire wavelength spectrum of the model's position signal, and it h…

positional-encoding rope long-context transformers ∑ ◫
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