Generating Minecraft Worlds with Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and Transformers
The post Dreaming in Cubes appeared first on Towards Data Science.
We implement xFormers, a practical toolkit for fast, memory-efficient Transformer models on GPUs. We validate memory-efficient attention against a standard implementation, then compare speed and memory across sequence lengths. We work through causal masking, packed variable-length sequences, grouped-query attention, and custom ALiBi biases. Finally, we combine these into a trainable GPT-style model with SwiGLU layers and automatic mixed-precision training.
The post How to Build Memory-Efficient Transformers with xFormers Using Packed Sequences, GQA, ALiBi, SwiGLU, and Causal Attention appeared first on MarkTechPost.
A retrospective on my MS thesis, the leaderboard it placed on, and the LLM shift that has reshaped the field since.
The post EmoNet: Speaker-Aware Transformers for Emotion Recognition — and What I’d Build Differently in 2026 appeared first on Towards Data Science.
How did semantic search evolve from simple keyword matching into modern transformer-based language understanding? This hands-on article builds four generations of semantic search systems step by step using Python.
The post From TF-IDF to Transformers: Implementing Four Generations of Semantic Search appeared first on Towards Data Science.
After Donald Trump announced a pause to the US operation in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran's online propaganda machine was quick to declare victory. Explosive Media, one of the groups behind Lego-style videos mocking Trump, proclaimed it "TACO Tuesday", i.e. that the US President had “chickened out.” Meanwhile, Minecraft, the Minions, and Simpsons-style characters are joining the legions of copycats. Technology Correspondent Peter O’Brien looks at how these videos are actually made.
In this tutorial, we explore how to run OpenAI’s open-weight GPT-OSS models in Google Colab with a strong focus on their technical behavior, deployment requirements, and practical inference workflows. We begin by setting up the exact dependencies needed for Transformers-based execution, verifying GPU availability, and loading openai/gpt-oss-20b with the correct configuration using native MXFP4 quantization, […]
The post A End-to-End Coding Guide to Running OpenAI GPT-OSS Open-Weight Models with Advanced Inference Workflows appeared first on MarkTechPost.
From rank-stabilized scaling to quantization stability: A statistical and architectural deep dive into the optimizations powering modern Transformers.
The post 6 Things I Learned Building LLMs From Scratch That No Tutorial Teaches You appeared first on Towards Data Science.