How many Transformer Architecture questions are in this list?

38 questions are published in this slice right now (out of 100 requested). More land as our curation team publishes them.

Are these real AI interview questions?

Yes. Every question is sourced from real AI interview reports across companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and Cohere, then reviewed by senior AI engineers for accuracy.

Do these questions come with detailed answers?

Yes. Every entry links to a full answer with explanations, hints, key tradeoffs, and recommended follow-up questions. Most also include difficulty ratings and community quality scores.

How is the ranking calculated?

Questions are sorted by community quality score, with rating count as the tiebreaker, then difficulty (easier first). Quality scores come from interview candidates rating each question after working through it.

Where can I find more Transformer Architecture questions?

Beyond this Top 38 list, the full Transformer Architecture library on Zenaique includes every published question, filterable by format, difficulty, role, and experience level.

Curated · Transformer Architecture

Top 100 Transformer Architecture Interview Questions

Here are the top 38 AI interview questions on Transformer Architecture, sorted by community quality. Each entry links to a detailed answer with explanations, hints, and source-grade follow-ups. See all in this topic →

Sorted by community quality · refreshed as new questions are published.

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01
Explain scaled dot-product attention.
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.8
02
Explain why transformers replaced RNNs for language modeling.
Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.6
03
Which components make up a standard transformer block?
Multiple ChoiceEasy·Qual 4.5Mistral AI
04
Complete the pre-norm transformer block recipe
Fill in BlankEasy·Qual 4.0Mistral AI
05
Spot the error: 'The FFN mixes information across tokens'
Spot the ErrorEasy·Qual 4.0
06
Pair each transformer family with its canonical pretraining objective
Match PairsEasy·Qual 4.0
07
Complete the RMSNorm formula
Fill in BlankEasy·Qual 4.0
08
Define d_model and name three architecture knobs that scale with it
FlashcardEasy·Qual 4.0
09
Which sublayer of a dense transformer block carries more parameters, attention or FFN?
Multiple ChoiceEasy·Qual 4.0
10
Name a 2026 task where an encoder-decoder transformer still beats a decoder-only LLM
Short AnswerEasy·Qual 4.0
11
Why does the transformer block use LayerNorm or RMSNorm instead of BatchNorm?
Multiple ChoiceEasy·Qual 4.0
12
Describe the residual stream as a read/write surface that sublayers act on
FlashcardEasy·Qual 4.0Anthropic
13
Pick the 2026 task where an encoder-only transformer still beats a decoder-only LLM
Multiple ChoiceEasy·Qual 4.0
14
Which design choices from the original 'Attention Is All You Need' are no longer standard?
Multi-selectMedium·Qual 4.0Mistral AI
15
Same block, two regimes: training parallelism versus inference autoregression
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
16
Spot the error: 'Pre-norm and post-norm are interchangeable, just a stylistic choice'
Spot the ErrorMedium·Qual 4.0
17
Which of these are linear layers that 'all-linear' LoRA targets in a SwiGLU transformer?
Multi-selectMedium·Qual 4.0
18
What fraction of a 7B transformer lives in its embedding table at vocab 128k?
Multiple ChoiceMedium·Qual 4.0
19
Why does a deep transformer stack stop training if you remove the residual connections?
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
20
Order the tail-end operations that turn the last residual stream into logits
Order StepsMedium·Qual 4.0
21
Define tied embeddings and explain why Llama-3 chose to untie them
FlashcardMedium·Qual 4.0
22
What does 'position-wise' actually mean for the transformer FFN sublayer?
Multiple ChoiceMedium·Qual 4.0
23
Pick the recipe a 2026 frontier open-weight LLM block actually ships
Multiple ChoiceMedium·Qual 4.0
24
Defend the 4x FFN expansion ratio, then explain why SwiGLU breaks the simple rule
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
25
Walk through why pre-norm trains stably past 100 layers while post-norm needs warmup tricks
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
26
Identify the locations where dropout typically sits inside a transformer block
Multi-selectMedium·Qual 4.0
27
What does the router inside a Mixture-of-Experts block actually do, per token?
FlashcardMedium·Qual 4.0
28
Match each positional encoding scheme to where it enters the architecture
Match PairsMedium·Qual 4.0
29
Predict the typical layer count for a Llama 7B and a Llama 70B
Predict OutputMedium·Qual 4.0
30
Why did decoder-only architectures take over tasks T5-style encoder-decoders used to win?
Short AnswerMedium·Qual 4.0
31
Order the operations inside a single pre-norm transformer block forward pass
Order StepsMedium·Qual 4.0Mistral AI
32
Defend untying the output head: what does an extra ~500M parameters at the tail of the stack buy?
Short AnswerHard·Qual 4.0
33
Pick the statements that accurately describe how an MoE sublayer replaces a dense FFN
Multi-selectHard·Qual 4.0
34
Chinchilla's lesson: how did it reshape architecture and training choices after 2022?
Short AnswerHard·Qual 4.0AnthropicOpenAI
35
Pair each 2017 transformer ingredient with its 2026 production replacement
Match PairsHard·Qual 4.0
36
Spend a fixed parameter budget: more layers or wider d_model, and what does the evidence say?
Short AnswerHard·Qual 4.0
37
Select the correct comparisons of an MoE transformer versus a dense transformer at equal active parameters
Multi-selectHard·Qual 4.0
38
Predict the trainable parameter count for a Llama-style 7B decoder block by block
Predict OutputHard·Qual 4.0

38 of 100 requested: only 38 published in this topic so far.

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