Understanding Decoder-Only Transformers Part 2: Decoder-Only vs Regular Transformers

In this article, we will look at the differences between a decoder-only transformer and a standard (encoder–decoder) transformer . How Decoder-Only Transformers Work A decoder-only transformer uses the same components to process the input prompt and to generate the output. It relies on masked self-attention , which considers only the current word and the words that came before it . Masked self-attention is applied to both: the input prompt the generated output This means the entire process is ha