Flash Attention

Deep Learning

A subset of machine learning using neural networks with multiple layers to learn hierarchical representations of data.

Neural Network

A computing system inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes that process information in layers.

Convolutional Neural Network

A deep learning architecture designed for processing structured grid data like images, using convolutional filters to detect features.

Recurrent Neural Network

A neural network architecture where connections between nodes form directed cycles, enabling processing of sequential data.

Long Short-Term Memory

A recurrent neural network architecture designed to learn long-term dependencies by using gating mechanisms to control information flow.

Gated Recurrent Unit

A simplified variant of LSTM that combines the forget and input gates into a single update gate.

Transformer

A neural network architecture based entirely on attention mechanisms, eliminating recurrence and enabling parallel processing of sequences.

Attention Mechanism

A neural network component that learns to focus on relevant parts of the input when producing each element of the output.

Encoder-Decoder Architecture

A neural network design where an encoder processes input into a fixed representation and a decoder generates output from it.

Autoencoder

A neural network trained to encode input data into a compressed representation and then decode it back to reconstruct the original.

Variational Autoencoder

A generative model that learns a probabilistic latent space representation, enabling generation of new data samples.

Batch Normalisation

A technique that normalises layer inputs during training to stabilise and accelerate deep neural network learning.

A technique that injects information about the position of tokens in a sequence into transformer architectures.

A neural network designed to operate on graph-structured data, learning representations of nodes, edges, and entire graphs.

An individual attention computation within a multi-head attention layer that learns to focus on different aspects of the input, with outputs concatenated for richer representations.

The process of adapting a pre-trained model to a specific task by continuing training on a smaller task-specific dataset, transferring learned representations to new domains.

A distributed training strategy that replicates the model across multiple devices and divides training data into batches processed simultaneously, synchronising gradients after each step.

An optimisation in autoregressive transformer inference that stores previously computed key and value tensors to avoid redundant computation during sequential token generation.

An attention mechanism where each element in a sequence attends to all other elements to compute its representation.

Methods for adapting large pretrained models to new tasks by only updating a small fraction of their parameters.