The white papers that actually moved the field, each linked to the original and paired with my plain-language summary, a glossary of the terms, and what it changes in practice.
01
Vaswani, Shazeer, Parmar, Uszkoreit, Jones, Gomez, Kaiser & Polosukhin — Google Brain / Google Research
The 2017 paper that replaced word-by-word reading with “attention” and, in doing so, quietly invented the architecture behind every large language model since.
02
Lewis et al.
Trained the retriever and the generator together. Narrower, and more interesting, than what "RAG" came to mean.
03
Hu et al.
Fine-tune two small matrices instead of the whole model, and swap adapters at serving time.
04
Dao et al.
Attention was memory-bound, not compute-bound. Tiling it into fast memory is why long context got cheap.
All original papers remain the work of their authors and link to the official source (arXiv or publisher). Summaries and glossaries on this site are my own commentary.