Michael Brenndoerfer | Data & AI, Private Equity, Technology

Michael Brenndoerfer

Transformer Block Assembly › Visualizing the Block Structure

Michael BrenndoerferUpdated June 13, 20253 min read

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Part 15 of 67Transformer Blocks

Chapter 110Transformer Block Assembly › Visualizing the Block Structure

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The component relationships become clearer with a visual diagram:

Out[13]:

Visualization

Block diagram showing transformer block with RMSNorm, attention, and FFN components connected by residual paths. — Complete transformer block structure with pre-normalization. The input flows through two sublayers (attention and FFN), each wrapped with normalization and a residual connection. The residual path (blue arrows) bypasses the sublayer. This gives direct gradient flow.

The diagram makes the pre-norm pattern explicit. At each sublayer, the input first passes through RMSNorm, then through the main transformation (attention or FFN), and finally the result is added back to the original input via the residual connection. The blue residual paths bypass the transformations entirely. This ensures gradients can flow directly from output to input.