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>the terms "Query" and "Value" are largely arbitrary and meaningless in practice

This is the most confusing thing about it imo. Those words all mean something but they're just more matrix multiplications. Nothing was being searched for.

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Better resources will note the terms are just historical and not really relevant anymore, and just remain a naming convention for self-attention formulas. IMO it is harmful to learning and good pedagogy to say they are anything more than this, especially as we better understand the real thing they are doing is approximating feature-feature correlations / similarity matrices, or perhaps even more generally, just allow for multiplicative interactions (https://openreview.net/forum?id=rylnK6VtDH).

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