Explain transformer architecture and variants

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's mastery of transformer architecture and related competencies such as attention mechanisms, positional encodings, encoder/decoder variants, computational complexity and scaling, stability and initialization practices, and adaptation of sequence models to molecular representations.

Explain transformer architecture and variants

Company: Google

Role: Machine Learning Engineer

Category: Machine Learning

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Technical Screen

Explain the Transformer architecture in detail. Include: the encoder/decoder stack structure; self-attention, cross-attention, and position-wise feed-forward networks; the scaled dot-product attention equation (key/query/value shapes) and multi-head attention. Describe positional encodings (sinusoidal vs learned, relative positions) and their impact on order. Contrast encoder-only, decoder-only, and encoder–decoder models and discuss masking for autoregressive decoding. Analyze computational/memory complexity O(n²) and methods to scale to long sequences (sparse/linear attention variants and their trade-offs). Discuss LayerNorm placement (pre-LN vs post-LN), residual connections, stability considerations, and initialization. Finally, outline how you would adapt Transformers to molecular data such as SMILES strings or molecular graphs, including tokenization, stereochemistry handling, data augmentation, and suitable training objectives (masked LM, autoregressive LM, contrastive pretraining).

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's mastery of transformer architecture and related competencies such as attention mechanisms, positional encodings, encoder/decoder variants, computational complexity and scaling, stability and initialization practices, and adaptation of sequence models to molecular representations.

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Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
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Technical Screen: Explain the Transformer Architecture

Scope

Provide a structured deep-dive into Transformers. Your explanation should cover theory, shapes/equations, engineering considerations, and practical adaptations to molecular data.

Required Topics

  1. Encoder/decoder stack
    • Encoder blocks and decoder blocks (where self-attention, cross-attention, and position-wise feed-forward networks fit)
    • Residual connections and normalization placement
  2. Attention mechanisms
    • Self-attention vs cross-attention
    • Scaled dot-product attention: equation and tensor shapes for queries (Q), keys (K), and values (V)
    • Multi-head attention: how heads are formed and concatenated
  3. Positional information
    • Absolute positional encodings: sinusoidal vs learned
    • Relative position methods (e.g., relative biases, rotary encodings) and their impact on order/generalization
  4. Model families and masking
    • Encoder-only vs decoder-only vs encoder–decoder models
    • Masking strategies for autoregressive decoding (causal mask, padding mask)
  5. Complexity and scaling
    • Time/memory cost O(n²) of attention and practical inference details (KV cache)
    • Methods to handle long sequences: sparse and linear-attention variants; trade-offs
  6. Stability and initialization
    • LayerNorm placement (pre-LN vs post-LN), residual connections, stability considerations
    • Initialization and other training practices (dropout, LR warmup, etc.)
  7. Adapting to molecular data
    • SMILES: tokenization, stereochemistry handling, data augmentation
    • Molecular graphs: inputs/features, positional/edge encodings
    • Training objectives: masked LM, autoregressive LM, contrastive pretraining
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