A Primer on Decoder-Only vs Encoder-Decoder Models for AI Translation

Ganesh Jha on Instagram: "Not all Transformers are built for the same job. At a high level, there are three families: ● Encoder-only ● Decoder-only ● Encoder–decoder They mainly differ in what they’re good at: understanding, generating, or mapping one sequence to another. Encoder-only models, like BERT or RoBERTa, read the entire input at once using bidirectional attention. They don’t generate text. Instead, they turn words into rich embeddings that represent meaning. To use them, you attach a s