Transformer

Transformer

In electrical engineering, a transformer is a passive component that transfers electrical energy from one electrical circuit to another circuit, or multiple circuits. A varying current in any coil of the transformer produces a varying magnetic flux in the transformer's core, which induces a varying electromotive force (EMF) across any other coils wound around the same core. Electrical energy can be transferred between separate coils without a metallic (conductive) connection between the two circuits. Faraday's law of induction, discovered in 1831, describes the induced voltage effect in any coil due to a changing magnetic flux encircled by the coil.

Transformer (deep learning)

In deep learning, the transformer is a family of artificial neural network architectures based on the multi-head attention mechanism, in which input data such as text, images, or audio is converted to a sequence of numerical representations called tokens, and each token is converted into a vector through an embedding layer. At each layer, each token is then contextualized within the scope of the context window with other (unmasked) tokens via a parallel multi-head attention mechanism, allowing the signal for key tokens to be amplified and less important tokens to be diminished. Because self-attention alone is permutation-invariant, transformers inject positional information, typically through positional encodings or learned positional embeddings, so token order can affect the output.

Transformer

Noun

1. A toy in the Transformers toyline which has mechanical parts that allow it to be altered in appearance from its original form as a humanoid robot action figure to another form, usually a vehicle, depending on the toy.
2. In the Transformers franchise, any of the alien humanoid robots that can mechanically alter their appearance, or "transform", into a vehicle, creature, or (rarely) a tool.