Decoding Transformers' Superiority over RNNs in NLP Tasks

Data Science Tech Brief By HackerNoon

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Explore the intriguing journey from Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to Transformers in the world of Natural Language Processing in our latest piece: 'The Trans
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Despite Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) designed to mirror certain aspects of human cognition, they've been surpassed by Transformers in Natural Language Processing tasks. The primary reasons include RNNs' issues with the vanishing gradient problem, difficulty in capturing long-range dependencies, and training inefficiencies. The hypothesis that larger RNNs could mitigate these issues falls short in practice due to computational inefficiencies and memory constraints. On the other hand, Transformers leverage their parallel processing ability and self-attention mechanism to efficiently handle sequences and train larger models. Thus, the evolution of AI architectures is driven not only by biological plausibility but also by practical considerations such as computational efficiency and scalability.