A Survey of Deep Learning: From Activations to Transformers
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Abstract (arXiv)
Deep learning has made tremendous progress in the last decade. A key success factor is the large amount of architectures, layers, objectives, and optimization techniques. They include a myriad of variants related to attention, normalization, skip connections, transformers and self-supervised learning schemes -- to name a few. We provide a comprehensive overview of the most important, recent works in these areas to those who already have a basic understanding of deep learning. We hope that a holistic and unified treatment of influential, recent works helps researchers to form new connections between diverse areas of deep learning. We identify and discuss multiple patterns that summarize the key strategies for many of the successful innovations over the last decade as well as works that can be seen as rising stars. We also include a discussion on recent commercially built, closed-source models such as OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's PaLM 2.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 61 of its 96 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 1 Feb 2023.
Builds on
61 of 96 references.
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38 more
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 1; 2024: 2; 2025: 2.
5 papers.
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- 2025Large language models for automated scholarly paper review: A surveycited by 59
- 2024What comes after transformers? -- A selective survey connecting ideas in deep learningcited by 3
- 2024Topic Modeling with Fine-tuning LLMs and Bag of Sentencescited by 2
- 2025S-Crescendo: A Nested Transformer Weaving Framework for Scalable Nonlinear System in S-Domain Representationcited by 0
- 2025S-Crescendo: A Nested Transformer Weaving Framework for Scalable Nonlinear System in S-Domain Representation17 May 2025
- 2025Large language models for automated scholarly paper review: A survey17 Jan 2025
- 2024Topic Modeling with Fine-tuning LLMs and Bag of Sentences6 Aug 2024
- 2024What comes after transformers? -- A selective survey connecting ideas in deep learning1 Aug 2024
- 2023Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) 2.0: A Manifesto of Open Challenges and Interdisciplinary Research Directions30 Oct 2023