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Seq2Seq

Mapping one sequence to another, as in translation or summarization.

Definition

Seq2Seq, short for sequence-to-sequence, is a modeling approach that maps an input sequence to an output sequence of possibly different length. An encoder reads the input into an internal representation and a decoder generates the output from it, token by token. It is the standard framing for tasks like machine translation and summarization, and early seq2seq systems used RNNs before encoder-decoder Transformers took over.