transformer

C1 · Advanced Countable noun Formal

n. a person or thing that changes the shape or character of something else.

n. an agent, person, or mechanism that effects a significant change in the form, nature, or appearance of something.

“The new CEO was a transformer who completely changed how the company worked.”

“The artist viewed the kiln not just as a tool, but as a transformer of raw clay into permanent sculpture.”

C1 · Advanced Countable noun Computing Technical

n. a type of computer system used in AI to understand and generate text or images.

n. a deep learning model architecture that relies on the mechanism of attention to weigh the influence of different parts of input data.

“Modern AI tools like chatbots are built using a transformer architecture.”

“The introduction of the transformer model revolutionised natural language processing by allowing for more efficient parallelization than previous recurrent networks.”

B1 · Intermediate Countable noun Informal

n. a toy robot that can be folded or changed into a vehicle or animal.

n. a fictional alien robot or associated toy capable of mechanically shifting between a humanoid form and an alternative mode, such as a vehicle.

“The child spent all afternoon changing his transformer from a robot into a yellow car.”

“The franchise became a global phenomenon, centered on the conflict between two factions of transformers that could disguise themselves as everyday machinery.”