>>106023985Transformer models are not Markov processes, and this is actually a crucial distinction that highlights one of the key innovations of the transformer architecture.
In a Markov process, the next state depends only on the current state - there's no "memory" of the full history. For language modeling, this would mean predicting the next token based only on the immediately preceding token, ignoring all earlier context.
Transformer models, however, use self-attention mechanisms that allow each position to attend to all previous positions in the sequence simultaneously. This means when predicting the next token, the model has access to the entire preceding context, not just the most recent token or state.
This non-Markovian property is what enables transformers to:
Maintain long-range dependencies across sequences
Resolve references and pronouns that might be separated by many tokens
Understand complex syntactic structures that span multiple clauses
Generate coherent text that maintains thematic consistency over long passages
The self-attention mechanism essentially creates a representation where each token's processing is informed by the entire context history, violating the Markov assumption of conditional independence given the current state.
This distinction is fundamental to understanding why transformers have been so successful compared to earlier sequential models like basic RNNs, which were more Markovian in nature (though even RNNs with hidden states technically weren't pure Markov processes either).