4/10/25, 9:37 PM Understanding Transformer model architectures - Practical Artificial Intelligence

Understanding Transformer model

Transformers are a powerful deep learning architecture that have revolutionized the field of Natural Language

Processing (NLP). They have been used to achieve state-of-the-art results on a variety of tasks, including

language translation, text classification, and text generation. One of the key strengths of transformers is their

flexibility, as they can be adapted to a wide range of tasks and problems by changing their architecture.

However, not every transformer model is the same; there are varying architectures, and picking the right one for

the task at hand is important to get the best results.

Here we will explore the different types of transformer architectures that exist, the applications that they can be

applied to and list some example models using the different architectures.

Encoder-Decoder
The Encoder-Decoder architecture was the original

transformer architecture introduced in the Attention Is All

You Need (https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

It works as follows: the encoder (on the left) processes the

input sequence and generates a hidden representation that

summarizes the input information. The decoder (on the

right) uses this hidden representation to generate the

desired output sequence. The encoder and decoder are

trained end-to-end to maximize the likelihood of the correct

output sequence given the input sequence.

This mapping of the input sequence to output sequence

makes these types of models suitable for applications like:

Translation

Text summarization

Question and answering

Example models using this architecture are:

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4/10/25, 9:37 PM Understanding Transformer model architectures - Practical Artificial Intelligence

T5 – Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer

(https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683.pdf))

BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and

Comprehension ( (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13461)https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13461

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13461))

Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05150

(https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.05150.pdf))

Encoder-only
The Encoder-only architecture, on the other hand, is used when only encoding the input sequence is required

and the decoder is not necessary. Here the input sequence is encoded into a fixed-length representation and

then used as input to a classifier or a regressor to make a prediction.

These models have a pre-trained general-purpose encoder but will require fine-tuning of the final classifier or

regressor.

This output flexibility makes them useful for many applications, such as:

Text classification

Sentiment analysis

Named entity recognition

Example models using this architecture are:

BERT ( (https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805)https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805))

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4/10/25, 9:37 PM Understanding Transformer model architectures - Practical Artificial Intelligence

DistilBERT ( (https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108)https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108))

RoBERTa ( (https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692)https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692

(https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.11692))

Decoder-only
In the Decoder-only architecture, the model consists of only a decoder, which is trained to predict the next token

in a sequence given the previous tokens. The critical difference between the Decoder-only architecture and the

Encoder-Decoder architecture is that the Decoder-only architecture does not have an explicit encoder to
summarize the input information. Instead, the information is encoded implicitly in the hidden state of the

decoder, which is updated at each step of the generation process.

This architecture is useful for applications such as:

Text completion

Text generation

Translation

Question-Answering

Generating image captions

Example models using this architecture are:

Generative Pre-Training models ( (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/openai-assets/research-

covers/language-unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf)https://s3-us-west-

2.amazonaws.com/openai-assets/research-covers/language-

unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf (https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/openai-

assets/research-covers/language-unsupervised/language_understanding_paper.pdf)) also called GPT

models such as GPT-3, ChatGPT and GPT-J

Google LaMDA ( (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239.pdf)https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239

(https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.08239))

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models (

(https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01068)https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01068 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.01068))

BLOOM: BigScience Large Open-science Open-access Multilingual Language Model (

(https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom)https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom

(https://bigscience.huggingface.co/blog/bloom))

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