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Output Projection

The output projection is a learned linear map W_O applied to the concatenated multi-head output, mixing information across heads and producing the final attention layer output added to the residual stream.

What is Output Projection?

The output projection is a learned linear map W_O applied to the concatenated multi-head output, mixing information across heads and producing the final attention layer output added to the residual stream.

The output projection is a learned linear map W_O applied to the concatenated multi-head output, mixing information across heads and producing the final attention layer output added to the residual stream.

Where is it used?

Every `nn.MultiheadAttention` ends with `W_O: nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)`; in Llama and GPT, this projection's output is added to the input (residual) and then passed through LayerNorm.

How to build it

Apply `W_O = nn.Linear(d_model, d_model)` to the concatenated tensor, add the result to the original input `x + attn_out`, and verify the output shape matches for the next layer.