AI Glossary

Encoder

What does “Encoder” mean?

Encoder: The part of a model that reads input and turns it into a numerical representation capturing its meaning. Encoder-only models such as BERT see the whole input at once, which suits tasks like classification, search and understanding rather than open-ended writing.

Encoder visual guide: The part of a model that reads input and turns it into a numerical representation capturing its meaning. Encoder-only models such as BERT see the whole input at once, which suits tasks like classification, search and understanding rather than open-ended writing.
Visual guide Open full size (new tab)

What is an example of “Encoder”?

Search systems often use encoder models to turn queries and documents into vectors so that relevant matches can be found by meaning, not just exact keywords.

Keep learning

See also

DecoderTermEncoder-decoder modelTermBERTTermEmbedding modelTerm

Same topic

TransformerTermVariational autoencoderTermFrontier modelTermDiffusion modelTermGenerative adversarial networkTerm