AI by Hand ✍️

AI by Hand ✍️

Autoregressive

RNNs by Hand, in Excel

Prof. Tom Yeh's avatar
Prof. Tom Yeh
Sep 27, 2026
∙ Paid

Library › RNNs by Hand, in Excel

  1. Recurrence

  2. Size

  3. Outputs

  4. Depth

  5. Seq2Seq

  6. Tokens

  7. Autoregressive

  8. Loss

  9. Small Language Model

In the last article, the network read tokens and wrote them. But which token it picked had no influence on what came next. How does a network read what it writes? Each output becomes the next step's input. A network that feeds on its own outputs is called autoregressive.

d=1, h=2, y=1, seq=5, one-to-many

We start with a one-to-many network, like the decoder of the Seq2Seq article, reading a single number at its first step. The first input, x₁ = 1, starts it. After that, every input is 0, dimmed, so each step runs on its state alone. The five outputs are 0.76, −0.43, −0.24, 0.58, and −0.28. In the download, change x₁, and all five outputs follow.

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