{ "source_file": "0930", "source_platform": "Medium", "author": "Angela Shi & Kezhan Shi", "title_listed": "The Machine Learning Advent Calendar Day 24: Transformers for Text in Excel", "keywords": "", "domain": "大模型算法", "content_type": "深度技术解析", "is_paid_flag": "否", "url": "https://towardsdatascience.com/the-machine-learning-advent-calendar-day-24-transformers-for-text-in-excel/", "publish_date": "2025-12-24", "corpus_stage": "", "notes": "", "id": "a9c7be3ce3ec", "collected_at": "2026-10-02T01:33:51", "title": "The Machine Learning “Advent Calendar” Day 24: Transformers for Text in Excel | Towards Data Science", "body_markdown": "![Revisit consent button](../images/body-df29beacd7496220cc94.svg)\nWe value your privacy\nWe use cookies to enhance your browsing experience, serve personalised ads or content, and analyse our traffic. 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The Transformer is not just a fancy name. It is the backbone of modern Large Language Models.\nThere is a lot to say about RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs. They played a key historical role in sequence modeling. But today, modern LLMs are overwhelmingly based on Transformers.\nThe name Transformer itself marks a rupture. From a naming perspective, the authors could have chosen something like Attention Neural Networks, in line with Recurrent Neural Networks or Convolutional Neural Networks. As a Cartesian mind, I would have appreciated a more consistent naming structure. But naming aside, the conceptual shift introduced by Transformers fully justifies the distinction.\nTransformers can be used in different ways. Encoder architectures are commonly used for classification. Decoder architectures are used for next-token prediction, so for text generation.\nIn this article, we will focus on one core idea only: how the attention matrix transforms input embeddings into something more meaningful.\nIn the previous article, we introduced 1D Convolutional Neural Networks for text. We saw that a CNN scans a sentence using small windows and reacts when it recognizes local patterns. This approach is already very powerful, but it has a clear limitation: a CNN only looks locally.\nToday, we move one step further.\nThe Transformer answers a fundamentally different question.\nWhat if every word could look at all the other words at once?\nLearn this step by step with the interactive [Machine Learning](https://roadmap.sh/machine-learning) roadmap.\n## 1. The same word in two different contexts\nTo understand why attention is needed, we will start with a simple idea.\nWe will use **two different input sentences** , both containing the word _mouse_ , but used in different contexts.\nIn the first input, _mouse_ appears in a sentence with _cat_. In the second input, _mouse_ appears in a sentence with _keyboard_.\n![](../images/001.png)\nTransformers in Excel - all images by author\nAt the input level, we deliberately use **the same embedding for the word “mouse” in both cases**. This is important. At this stage, the model does not know which meaning is intended.\nThe embedding for _mouse_ contains both:\n * a strong animal component\n * a strong tech component\n\n\nThis ambiguity is intentional. Without context, _mouse_ could refer to an animal or to a computer device.\nAll other words provide clearer signals. _Cat_ is strongly animal. _Keyboard_ is strongly tech. Words like _and_ or _are_ mainly carry grammatical information. Words like _friends_ and _useful_ are weakly informative on their own.\nAt this point, nothing in the input embeddings allows the model to decide which meaning of _mouse_ is correct.\nIn the next chapter, we will see how the attention matrix performs this transformation, step by step.\n## 2. Self-attention: how context is injected into embeddings\n#### 2.1 Self-attention, not just attention\nWe first clarify what kind of attention we are using here. This chapter focuses on **self-attention**.\nSelf-attention means that each word looks at the other words of the **same input sequence**.\nIn this simplified example, we make an additional pedagogical choice. We assume that **Queries and Keys are directly equal to the input embeddings**. In other words, there are no learned weight matrices for Q and K in this chapter.\nThis is a deliberate simplification. It allows us to focus entirely on the attention mechanism, without introducing extra parameters. Similarity between words is computed directly from their embeddings.\nConceptually, this means: \nQ = Input \nK = Input\nOnly the Value vectors are used later to propagate information to the output.\nIn real Transformer models, Q, K, and V are all obtained through learned linear projections. Those projections add flexibility, but they do not change the logic of attention itself. The simplified version shown here captures the core idea.\nHere is the whole picture that we will decompose.\n![](../images/body-62b760b0286565fc2fbf.png)\n### 2.2 From input embeddings to raw attention scores\nWe start from the input embedding matrix, where each row corresponds to a word and each column corresponds to a semantic dimension.\nThe first operation is to compare every word with every other word. This is done by computing dot products between Queries and Keys.\nBecause Queries and Keys are equal to the input embeddings in this example, this step reduces to computing dot products between input vectors.\nAll dot products are computed at once using a matrix multiplication: \nScores = Input × Inputᵀ\nEach cell of this matrix answers a simple question: how similar are these two words, given their embeddings?\nAt this stage, the values are raw scores. They are not probabilities, and they do not yet have a direct interpretation as weights.\n![](../images/body-a64ac9a559e395806c17.png)\n#### 2.3 Scaling and normalization\nRaw dot products can grow large as the embedding dimension increases. To keep values in a stable range, the scores are scaled by the square root of the embedding dimension.\nScaledScores = Scores / √d\nThis scaling step is not conceptually deep, but it is practically important. It prevents the next step, the softmax, from becoming too sharp.\n![](../images/body-52ae16ea971493222ea1.png)\nOnce scaled, a softmax is applied row by row. This converts raw scores into positive values that sum to one.\nThe result is the **attention matrix**.\nAnd [attention](https://ko-fi.com/angelashi/link/ATTENTION) is all you need.\nEach row of this matrix describes how much attention a given word pays to every other word in the sentence.\n![](../images/body-498f0800c1c388825a75.png)\n#### 2.4 Interpreting the attention matrix\nThe attention matrix is the central object of self-attention.\nFor a given word, its row in the attention matrix answers the question: when updating this word, which other words matter, and how much?\nFor example, the row corresponding to _mouse_ assigns higher weights to words that are semantically related in the current context. In the sentence with _cat_ and _friends_ , _mouse_ attends more to animal-related words. In the sentence with _keyboard_ and _useful_ , it attends more to technical words.\nThe mechanism is identical in both cases. Only the surrounding words change the outcome.\n### 2.5 From attention weights to output embeddings\nThe attention matrix itself is not the final result. It is a set of weights.\nTo produce the output embeddings, we combine these weights with the Value vectors.\nOutput = Attention × V\nIn this simplified example, the Value vectors are taken directly from the input embeddings. Each output word vector is therefore a weighted average of the input vectors, with weights given by the corresponding row of the attention matrix.\nFor a word like _mouse_ , this means that its final representation becomes a mixture of:\n * its own embedding\n * the embeddings of the words it attends to most\n\n\nThis is the precise moment where context is injected into the representation.\n![](../images/body-e9f62b4826b588503c55.png)\nAt the end of self-attention, the embeddings are no longer ambiguous.\nThe word _mouse_ no longer has the same representation in both sentences. Its output vector reflects its context. In one case, it behaves like an animal. In the other, it behaves like a technical object.\nNothing in the embedding table changed. What changed is how information was combined across words.\nThis is the core idea of self-attention, and the foundation on which Transformer models are built.\nIf we now compare the two examples, _cat and mouse_ on the left and _keyboard and mouse_ on the right, the effect of self-attention becomes explicit.\nIn both cases, the input embedding of _mouse_ is identical. Yet the final representation differs. In the sentence with _cat_ , the output embedding of _mouse_ is dominated by the animal dimension. In the sentence with _keyboard_ , the technical dimension becomes more prominent. Nothing in the embedding table changed. The difference comes entirely from how attention redistributed weights across words before mixing the values.\nThis comparison highlights the role of self-attention: it does not change words in isolation, but reshapes their representations by taking the full context into account.\n![](../images/body-3fdc4a31e1c88c6d91e5.png)\n## 3. Learning how to mix information\n![](../images/body-df7a82239811a69a998e.jpg)\nTransformers in Excel - all images by author\n#### 3.1 Introducing learned weights for Q, K, and V\nUntil now, we have focused on the mechanics of self-attention itself. We now introduce an important element: **learned weights**.\nIn a real Transformer, Queries, Keys, and Values are not taken directly from the input embeddings. Instead, they are produced by learned linear transformations.\nFor each word embedding, the model computes: \nQ = Input × W_Q \nK = Input × W_K \nV = Input × W_V\nThese weight matrices are learned during training.\nAt this stage, we usually keep the same dimensionality. The input embeddings, Q, K, V, and the output embeddings all have the same number of dimensions. This makes the role of attention easier to understand: it modifies representations without changing the space they live in.\nConceptually, these weights allow the model to decide:\n * which aspects of a word matter for comparison (Q and K)\n * which aspects of a word should be transmitted to others (V)\n\n\n![](../images/body-0551715e828d9ba0254c.png)\n#### 3.2 What the model actually learns\nThe attention mechanism itself is fixed. Dot products, scaling, softmax, and matrix multiplications always work the same way. What the model actually learns are the projections.\nBy adjusting the Q and K weights, the model learns how to measure relationships between words for a given task. By adjusting the V weights, it learns what information should be propagated when attention is high. The structure defines how information flows, while the weights define what information flows.\nBecause the attention matrix depends on Q and K, it is partially interpretable. We can inspect which words attend to which others and observe patterns that often align with syntax or semantics.\nThis becomes clear when comparing the same word in two different contexts. In both examples, the word _mouse_ starts with exactly the same input embedding, containing both an animal and a tech component. On its own, it is ambiguous.\nWhat changes is not the word, but the attention it receives. In the sentence with _cat_ and _friends_ , attention emphasizes animal-related words. In the sentence with _keyboard_ and _useful_ , attention shifts toward technical words. The mechanism and the weights are identical in both cases, yet the output embeddings differ. The difference comes entirely from how the learned projections interact with the surrounding context.\nThis is precisely why the attention matrix is interpretable: it reveals which relationships the model has learned to consider meaningful for the task.\n![](../images/body-3c63fbe748fc766a411a.png)\n#### 3.3 Changing the dimensionality on purpose\nNothing, however, forces Q, K, and V to have the same dimensionality as the input.\nThe Value projection, in particular, can map embeddings into a space of a different size. When this happens, the output embeddings inherit the dimensionality of the Value vectors.\nThis is not a theoretical curiosity. It is exactly what happens in real models, especially in multi-head attention. Each head operates in its own subspace, often with a smaller dimension, and the results are later concatenated into a larger representation.\nSo attention can do two things:\n * mix information across words\n * reshape the space in which this information lives\n\n\nThis explains why Transformers scale so well.\nThey do not rely on fixed features. They learn:\n * how to compare words\n * how to route information\n * how to project meaning into different spaces\n\n\n![](../images/body-c0d85c93cf1c2695a235.png)\nThe attention matrix controls _where_ information flows. \nThe learned projections control _what_ information flows and _how it is represented_.\nTogether, they form the core mechanism behind modern language models.\n## Conclusion\nThis Advent Calendar was built around a simple idea: understanding machine learning models by looking at how they actually transform data through spreadsheets.\nTransformers are a natural way to close this journey. They do not rely on fixed rules or local patterns, but on learned relationships between all elements of a sequence. Through attention, they turn static embeddings into contextual representations, which is the foundation of modern language models.\nTransformers can be used with an encoder for classification tasks, and with a decoder to predict the next token and generate text. I will start another series to explain deep learning step by step. If you have any requests or topics you would like to see, feel free to contact me.\nThank you again to everyone who followed this series, shared feedback, and supported it, especially the Towards Data Science team.\nMerry Christmas 🎄\n···\nAll the Excel files are available through this [Kofi link](https://ko-fi.com/s/4ddca6dff1). Your support means a lot to me. 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The Transformer is not just a fancy name. It is the backbone of modern Large Language Models.\nThere is a lot to say about RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs. They played a key historical role in sequence modeling. But today, modern LLMs are overwhelmingly based on Transformers.\nThe name Transformer itself marks a rupture. From a naming perspective, the authors could have chosen something like Attention Neural Networks, in line with Recurrent Neural Networks or Convolutional Neural Networks. As a Cartesian mind, I would have appreciated a more consistent naming structure. But naming aside, the conceptual shift introduced by Transformers fully justifies the distinction.\nTransformers can be used in different ways. Encoder architectures are commonly used for classification. Decoder architectures are used for next-token prediction, so for text generation.\nIn this article, we will focus on one core idea only: how the attention matrix transforms input embeddings into something more meaningful.\nIn the previous article, we introduced 1D Convolutional Neural Networks for text. We saw that a CNN scans a sentence using small windows and reacts when it recognizes local patterns. This approach is already very powerful, but it has a clear limitation: a CNN only looks locally.\nToday, we move one step further.\nThe Transformer answers a fundamentally different question.\nWhat if every word could look at all the other words at once?\nLearn this step by step with the interactive [Machine Learning](https://roadmap.sh/machine-learning) roadmap.\n## 1. The same word in two different contexts\nTo understand why attention is needed, we will start with a simple idea.\nWe will use **two different input sentences** , both containing the word _mouse_ , but used in different contexts.\nIn the first input, _mouse_ appears in a sentence with _cat_. In the second input, _mouse_ appears in a sentence with _keyboard_.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-437-1024x252.png)\nTransformers in Excel - all images by author\nAt the input level, we deliberately use **the same embedding for the word “mouse” in both cases**. This is important. At this stage, the model does not know which meaning is intended.\nThe embedding for _mouse_ contains both:\n * a strong animal component\n * a strong tech component\n\n\nThis ambiguity is intentional. Without context, _mouse_ could refer to an animal or to a computer device.\nAll other words provide clearer signals. _Cat_ is strongly animal. _Keyboard_ is strongly tech. Words like _and_ or _are_ mainly carry grammatical information. Words like _friends_ and _useful_ are weakly informative on their own.\nAt this point, nothing in the input embeddings allows the model to decide which meaning of _mouse_ is correct.\nIn the next chapter, we will see how the attention matrix performs this transformation, step by step.\n## 2. Self-attention: how context is injected into embeddings\n#### 2.1 Self-attention, not just attention\nWe first clarify what kind of attention we are using here. This chapter focuses on **self-attention**.\nSelf-attention means that each word looks at the other words of the **same input sequence**.\nIn this simplified example, we make an additional pedagogical choice. We assume that **Queries and Keys are directly equal to the input embeddings**. In other words, there are no learned weight matrices for Q and K in this chapter.\nThis is a deliberate simplification. It allows us to focus entirely on the attention mechanism, without introducing extra parameters. Similarity between words is computed directly from their embeddings.\nConceptually, this means: \nQ = Input \nK = Input\nOnly the Value vectors are used later to propagate information to the output.\nIn real Transformer models, Q, K, and V are all obtained through learned linear projections. Those projections add flexibility, but they do not change the logic of attention itself. The simplified version shown here captures the core idea.\nHere is the whole picture that we will decompose.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-438-1024x603.png)\n### 2.2 From input embeddings to raw attention scores\nWe start from the input embedding matrix, where each row corresponds to a word and each column corresponds to a semantic dimension.\nThe first operation is to compare every word with every other word. This is done by computing dot products between Queries and Keys.\nBecause Queries and Keys are equal to the input embeddings in this example, this step reduces to computing dot products between input vectors.\nAll dot products are computed at once using a matrix multiplication: \nScores = Input × Inputᵀ\nEach cell of this matrix answers a simple question: how similar are these two words, given their embeddings?\nAt this stage, the values are raw scores. They are not probabilities, and they do not yet have a direct interpretation as weights.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-442-1024x546.png)\n#### 2.3 Scaling and normalization\nRaw dot products can grow large as the embedding dimension increases. To keep values in a stable range, the scores are scaled by the square root of the embedding dimension.\nScaledScores = Scores / √d\nThis scaling step is not conceptually deep, but it is practically important. It prevents the next step, the softmax, from becoming too sharp.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-446-1024x845.png)\nOnce scaled, a softmax is applied row by row. This converts raw scores into positive values that sum to one.\nThe result is the **attention matrix**.\nAnd [attention](https://ko-fi.com/angelashi/link/ATTENTION) is all you need.\nEach row of this matrix describes how much attention a given word pays to every other word in the sentence.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-445-913x1024.png)\n#### 2.4 Interpreting the attention matrix\nThe attention matrix is the central object of self-attention.\nFor a given word, its row in the attention matrix answers the question: when updating this word, which other words matter, and how much?\nFor example, the row corresponding to _mouse_ assigns higher weights to words that are semantically related in the current context. In the sentence with _cat_ and _friends_ , _mouse_ attends more to animal-related words. In the sentence with _keyboard_ and _useful_ , it attends more to technical words.\nThe mechanism is identical in both cases. Only the surrounding words change the outcome.\n### 2.5 From attention weights to output embeddings\nThe attention matrix itself is not the final result. It is a set of weights.\nTo produce the output embeddings, we combine these weights with the Value vectors.\nOutput = Attention × V\nIn this simplified example, the Value vectors are taken directly from the input embeddings. Each output word vector is therefore a weighted average of the input vectors, with weights given by the corresponding row of the attention matrix.\nFor a word like _mouse_ , this means that its final representation becomes a mixture of:\n * its own embedding\n * the embeddings of the words it attends to most\n\n\nThis is the precise moment where context is injected into the representation.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-447-1024x503.png)\nAt the end of self-attention, the embeddings are no longer ambiguous.\nThe word _mouse_ no longer has the same representation in both sentences. Its output vector reflects its context. In one case, it behaves like an animal. In the other, it behaves like a technical object.\nNothing in the embedding table changed. What changed is how information was combined across words.\nThis is the core idea of self-attention, and the foundation on which Transformer models are built.\nIf we now compare the two examples, _cat and mouse_ on the left and _keyboard and mouse_ on the right, the effect of self-attention becomes explicit.\nIn both cases, the input embedding of _mouse_ is identical. Yet the final representation differs. In the sentence with _cat_ , the output embedding of _mouse_ is dominated by the animal dimension. In the sentence with _keyboard_ , the technical dimension becomes more prominent. Nothing in the embedding table changed. The difference comes entirely from how attention redistributed weights across words before mixing the values.\nThis comparison highlights the role of self-attention: it does not change words in isolation, but reshapes their representations by taking the full context into account.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-454-1024x824.png)\n## 3. Learning how to mix information\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Capture-decran-2025-12-24-a-17.04.31-775x1024.jpg)\nTransformers in Excel - all images by author\n#### 3.1 Introducing learned weights for Q, K, and V\nUntil now, we have focused on the mechanics of self-attention itself. We now introduce an important element: **learned weights**.\nIn a real Transformer, Queries, Keys, and Values are not taken directly from the input embeddings. Instead, they are produced by learned linear transformations.\nFor each word embedding, the model computes: \nQ = Input × W_Q \nK = Input × W_K \nV = Input × W_V\nThese weight matrices are learned during training.\nAt this stage, we usually keep the same dimensionality. The input embeddings, Q, K, V, and the output embeddings all have the same number of dimensions. This makes the role of attention easier to understand: it modifies representations without changing the space they live in.\nConceptually, these weights allow the model to decide:\n * which aspects of a word matter for comparison (Q and K)\n * which aspects of a word should be transmitted to others (V)\n\n\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-448-1024x631.png)\n#### 3.2 What the model actually learns\nThe attention mechanism itself is fixed. Dot products, scaling, softmax, and matrix multiplications always work the same way. What the model actually learns are the projections.\nBy adjusting the Q and K weights, the model learns how to measure relationships between words for a given task. By adjusting the V weights, it learns what information should be propagated when attention is high. The structure defines how information flows, while the weights define what information flows.\nBecause the attention matrix depends on Q and K, it is partially interpretable. We can inspect which words attend to which others and observe patterns that often align with syntax or semantics.\nThis becomes clear when comparing the same word in two different contexts. In both examples, the word _mouse_ starts with exactly the same input embedding, containing both an animal and a tech component. On its own, it is ambiguous.\nWhat changes is not the word, but the attention it receives. In the sentence with _cat_ and _friends_ , attention emphasizes animal-related words. In the sentence with _keyboard_ and _useful_ , attention shifts toward technical words. The mechanism and the weights are identical in both cases, yet the output embeddings differ. The difference comes entirely from how the learned projections interact with the surrounding context.\nThis is precisely why the attention matrix is interpretable: it reveals which relationships the model has learned to consider meaningful for the task.\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-451-1024x681.png)\n#### 3.3 Changing the dimensionality on purpose\nNothing, however, forces Q, K, and V to have the same dimensionality as the input.\nThe Value projection, in particular, can map embeddings into a space of a different size. When this happens, the output embeddings inherit the dimensionality of the Value vectors.\nThis is not a theoretical curiosity. It is exactly what happens in real models, especially in multi-head attention. Each head operates in its own subspace, often with a smaller dimension, and the results are later concatenated into a larger representation.\nSo attention can do two things:\n * mix information across words\n * reshape the space in which this information lives\n\n\nThis explains why Transformers scale so well.\nThey do not rely on fixed features. They learn:\n * how to compare words\n * how to route information\n * how to project meaning into different spaces\n\n\n![](https://assets.insightmediagroup.io/media/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/image-449-1024x635.png)\nThe attention matrix controls _where_ information flows. \nThe learned projections control _what_ information flows and _how it is represented_.\nTogether, they form the core mechanism behind modern language models.\n## Conclusion\nThis Advent Calendar was built around a simple idea: understanding machine learning models by looking at how they actually transform data through spreadsheets.\nTransformers are a natural way to close this journey. They do not rely on fixed rules or local patterns, but on learned relationships between all elements of a sequence. Through attention, they turn static embeddings into contextual representations, which is the foundation of modern language models.\nTransformers can be used with an encoder for classification tasks, and with a decoder to predict the next token and generate text. I will start another series to explain deep learning step by step. If you have any requests or topics you would like to see, feel free to contact me.\nThank you again to everyone who followed this series, shared feedback, and supported it, especially the Towards Data Science team.\nMerry Christmas 🎄\n···\nAll the Excel files are available through this [Kofi link](https://ko-fi.com/s/4ddca6dff1). Your support means a lot to me. 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