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concepts → Mechanism

Mechanism

Query, key, value

also called query-key-value

timeless1 connectiondraft

each token asks a question, every token advertises what it holds, and answers are blended by fit

Where it sits

The prism has six jobs across and eight layers down. Its primary cell isinfer × L1. Hatched cells cannot exist — a GPU does not learn, an institution does not infer.

What must come first — and what it unlocks

Left to right is reading order, derived from the prerequisite_of edges. Nothing here is hand-ordered: the diagram is the graph.

nothing comes first — this is a starting pointQuery, key, valuenothing depends on it yet — a leaf in the reading order

What kind of thing it is — and what it is made of

It is part of: Attention.

Where to read it

The chapter that introduces it, and any chapter that uses it again.

24Attention Is All You Needact 6 · The Attention Revolution

Where it comes from

paperAttention Is All You NeedAshish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin · 2017

Every connection

All 1 edges touching this node, grouped by relation family — the sections above are highlights from this list. Colours match the relation families inthe atlas.

Structure · 1
is part ofAttentionMechanism

This page is a projection of one node in src/data/concepts.ts. It has no prose file of its own — 230 declared edges produce all 236 of these pages. Edit an edge and both endpoints change.