📌 Most models use Grouped Query Attention. That doesn’t mean yours should.📌

Source: Dev.to

Overview

I’ve been noticing the same pattern lately. Whenever attention mechanisms arise, the answer is almost automatic: use Grouped Query Attention.

And honestly, I get why. GQA works. It’s efficient. It scales well. Most modern models rely on it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s always the right choice.

Choosing an attention mechanism

Depending on what you’re building—long context, tight latency budgets, or just experimenting—other designs can make more sense, such as:

• ✅ Multi‑head attention
• ✅ Multi‑query attention
• ✅ Latent attention

Videos

• 🎥 How to think about choosing an attention mechanism
• 🎥 Coding self‑attention from scratch

Image reference: @Hugging Face