In the context of self-attention and Transformer models, encoding and decoding refer to the processes of transforming input sequences into meaningful representations and then generating output sequences from these representations. Here’s a detailed breakdown: Encoding Purpose: The encoding process takes the input sequence and converts it into a high-dimensional space, capturing its semantic meaning and relationships between tokens. Steps in Encoding: 1. Input Embeddings : - Convert input tokens into continuous vector representations (embeddings). These embeddings are usually supplemented with positional encodings to maintain the order of tokens. 2. Positional Encoding: - Add positional encodings to the embeddings to provide information about the position of each token in the sequence. 3. Self-Attention Layers: Apply multiple layers of self-attention. Each layer consists of: Multi-Head Self-Attention: Each head in the multi-head attention mechanism learns diff...