Glossary

What is Multi-head Attention

Multi-head Attention is a mechanism widely used in deep learning, especially in natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). It was initially introduced in the Transformer model, revolutionizing sequence-to-sequence learning tasks. The core idea of Multi-head Attention is to split the input feature vectors into multiple subspaces and process them in parallel through multiple 'heads', capturing different features and relationships within the input data.


The operation of Multi-head Attention involves first linearly transforming the input data into multiple groups, where each group independently computes attention weights and generates outputs. Finally, these outputs are concatenated and passed through another linear transformation to merge them. This mechanism enhances the model's expressive power and efficiency.


In application scenarios, Multi-head Attention is used in tasks such as machine translation, text generation, and image recognition. Due to its flexibility and efficiency, it has become a core component of many modern deep learning models. In the future, with increased computational resources and continuous evolution of model architectures, Multi-head Attention is expected to find applications in even more fields.


However, it also has some drawbacks, such as high computational overhead, especially when dealing with long sequences, which may lead to performance degradation. Therefore, these factors need to be considered when designing models.