by Amit Shekhar · 29 May 2026
Self Attention in Transformers
Self Attention in Transformers. We will understand what it is, how it works step by step, and why it is the heart of modern Large Language Models like BERT and GPT.
Read on Outcome School ↗then come back to lock it in
Before you read, guessHow should one approach mastering KV cache compression techniques?
Ten seconds, a guess, then read — a wrong guess still makes the answer stick.
What this article covers
- What is Self Attention?
- Why do we need Self Attention?
- Query, Key, and Value vectors
- Step-by-step working of Self Attention
- A simple example walk-through
- Why Self Attention works so well
- Multi-Head Self Attention
- Where Self Attention is used
The article lives on outcomeschool.com. Read it there, then come back: the tutor in the margin has read it and will answer questions, and the questions below check what stayed.
