MBMACHINE BRIEF
AnalysisOriginalsModelsResearchStartupsTools
Newsletter

Navigate

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Newsletter
  • Search
  • Sitemap

Content

  • Original Analysis
  • Blog
  • Glossary
  • Best Lists
  • AI Tools

Categories

  • Models
  • Research
  • Startups
  • Robotics
  • Policy
  • Business
  • Analysis
  • Originals

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
Machine Brief|

2026 Machine Brief. All rights reserved.

  1. Home
  2. /Glossary
  3. /Self-Attention
Back to Glossary
ai

Self-Attention

An attention mechanism where a sequence attends to itself — each element looks at all other elements to understand relationships.

Definition

An attention mechanism where a sequence attends to itself — each element looks at all other elements to understand relationships. This is what lets transformers capture long-range dependencies in text. The query, key, and value matrices compute attention scores that determine how much each word influences every other word.

Share this term

Related Terms

Attention

A mechanism that lets neural networks focus on the most relevant parts of their input when producing output.

Transformer

The neural network architecture behind virtually all modern AI language models.

Multi-Head Attention

An extension of the attention mechanism that runs multiple attention operations in parallel, each with different learned projections.

Activation Function

A mathematical function applied to a neuron's output that introduces non-linearity into the network.

Adam Optimizer

An optimization algorithm that combines the best parts of two other methods — AdaGrad and RMSProp.

AGI

Artificial General Intelligence.

Explore More

Latest NewsAI NewsMarketsAnalysisFull Glossary

Want to learn more about AI?

Browse our complete glossary or subscribe to our newsletter for the latest AI news and insights.

Browse GlossarySubscribe to Newsletter