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Technical GlossaryDeep Learning

Encoder-Decoder Transformer

The classical Transformer architecture that encodes an input sequence and contextually generates an output sequence.

The encoder-decoder Transformer is the classical architecture designed for translation, summarization, and sequence-to-sequence tasks. The encoder produces input representations, while the decoder generates the output sequence using those representations. Through cross-attention, output generation can be directly aligned with input context. This architecture forms an important historical foundation for modern generative language systems.