Key Idea: A data-dependent weighted average for pooling and communication, enabling flexible and powerful neural network connections.
Breakthrough: Bahdanau's "soft search" mechanism (softmax + weighted averaging) solved encoder-decoder bottlenecks in machine translation. Transformer Revolution: Attention Is All You Need (1706.03762) (2017) by @ashishvaswanigoogle et al. simplified architectures by stacking attention layers, introducing multi-headed attention and positional encodings. Legacy: Attention replaced RNNs, driving modern AI systems like ChatGPT. It emerged independently but was influenced by contemporaneous work like Alex Graves’s Neural Turing Machines (1410.5401) and Jason Weston’s Memory Networks (1410.3916) .
Attention to history: Jürgen Schmidhuber claims his 1992 Fast Weight Programmers anticipated modern attention mechanisms. While conceptually similar, the term “attention” was absent, and there’s no evidence it influenced Bahdanau, Cho, and Bengio’s 2014 work. Paying attention (!) to history might have brought us to genAI earlier – but credit for the breakthrough still goes to Montreal.
Who else deserves recognition in this groundbreaking narrative of innovation? Let’s ensure every contributor gets the credit they deserve. Leave a comment below 👇🏻🤗