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The 2014 paper “Generative Adversarial Nets” (GAN) by Ian Goodfellow et al. introduced a groundbreaking framework where two neural networks — a generator and a discriminator — compete in a minimax game: the generator tries to produce realistic data, while the discriminator tries to distinguish real from fake. This approach avoids Markov chains and approximate inference, relying solely on backpropagation. GANs revolutionized generative modeling, enabling realistic image, text, and audio generation, sparking massive advances in AI creativity, deepfake technology, and research on adversarial training and robustness.

The paper “Attention Is All You Need” (2017) introduced the Transformer — a novel neural architecture relying solely on self-attention, removing recurrence and convolutions. It revolutionized machine translation by dramatically improving training speed and translation quality (e.g., achieving 28.4 BLEU on English-German tasks), setting new state-of-the-art benchmarks. Its modular, parallelizable design opened the door to large-scale pretraining and fine-tuning, ultimately laying the foundation for modern large language models like BERT and GPT. This paper reshaped the landscape of NLP and deep learning, making attention-based models the dominant paradigm across many tasks.