ANALYTICAL REVIEW OF LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL ARCHITECTURES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20477615Keywords:
Large Language Models, Transformer Architecture, Generative AI, Mixture-of-Experts, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning.Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the foundation of modern Artificial Intelligence systems, enabling breakthroughs in natural language understanding, reasoning, code generation, multimodal learning, and autonomous agents. Recent advances in Transformer-based architectures have significantly improved model capabilities, scalability, and generalization performance. This paper presents a comprehensive analytical review of modern LLM architectures, tracing their evolution from early neural language models to contemporary frontier systems such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, DeepSeek, and Mistral. The study examines core architectural components including attention mechanisms, positional encoding, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multimodal extensions, and reasoning-enhanced designs. Furthermore, the paper discusses the strengths and limitations of current architectures and highlights future research directions toward efficient, trustworthy, and autonomous AI systems.
Downloads
References
[1] C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 379–423, 1948.
[2] F. Jelinek, Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press, 1997.
[3] L. R. Rabiner, “A Tutorial on Hidden Markov Models and Selected Applications in Speech Recognition,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 257–286, 1989.
[4] A. Berger, S. Della Pietra, and V. Della Pietra, “A Maximum Entropy Approach to Natural Language Processing,” Computational Linguistics, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 39–71, 1996.
[5] Y. Bengio, R. Ducharme, P. Vincent, and C. Jauvin, “A Neural Probabilistic Language Model,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 3, pp. 1137–1155, 2003.
[6] T. Mikolov, K. Chen, G. Corrado, and J. Dean, “Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space,” arXiv:1301.3781, 2013.
[7] T. Mikolov, I. Sutskever, K. Chen, G. Corrado, and J. Dean, “Distributed Representations of Words and Phrases and Their Compositionality,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2013.
[8] J. Pennington, R. Socher, and C. D. Manning, “GloVe: Global Vectors for Word Representation,” in Proceedings of EMNLP, 2014, pp. 1532–1543.
[9] J. L. Elman, “Finding Structure in Time,” Cognitive Science, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 179–211, 1990.
[10] S. Hochreiter and J. Schmidhuber, “Long Short-Term Memory,” Neural Computation, vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 1735–1780, 1997.
[11] F. A. Gers, J. Schmidhuber, and F. Cummins, “Learning to Forget: Continual Prediction with LSTM,” Neural Computation, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. 2451–2471, 2000.
[12] K. Cho et al., “Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder–Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation,” arXiv:1406.1078, 2014.
[13] J. Chung, C. Gulcehre, K. Cho, and Y. Bengio, “Empirical Evaluation of Gated Recurrent Neural Networks on Sequence Modeling,” arXiv:1412.3555, 2014.
[14] A. Vaswani et al., “Attention Is All You Need,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2017.
[15] A. Radford et al., “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training,” OpenAI, 2018.
[16] J. Devlin, M.-W. Chang, K. Lee, and K. Toutanova, “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding,” in Proceedings of NAACL-HLT, 2019.
[17] A. Radford et al., “Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners,” OpenAI Technical Report, 2019.
[18] T. Brown et al., “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2020.
[19] C. Raffel et al., “Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer,” Journal of Machine Learning Research, vol. 21, no. 140, pp. 1–67, 2020.
[20] J. Dai et al., “Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context,” in Proceedings of ACL, 2019.
[21] Z. Yang et al., “XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2019.
[22] T. B. Brown et al., “GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners,” arXiv:2005.14165, 2020.
[23] H. Touvron et al., “LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models,” arXiv:2302.13971, 2023.
[24] H. Touvron et al., “LLaMA 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models,” arXiv:2307.09288, 2023.
[25] A. Chowdhery et al., “PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways,” arXiv:2204.02311, 2022.
[26] R. Anil et al., “PaLM 2 Technical Report,” arXiv:2305.10403, 2023.
[27] Anthropic, “Claude: Constitutional AI and Large Language Models,” 2023.
[28] Google DeepMind, “Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models,” arXiv:2312.11805, 2023.
[29] A. Jiang et al., “Mistral 7B,” arXiv:2310.06825, 2023.
[30] DeepSeek-AI, “DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Long Context,” 2024.
[31] S. Shazeer et al., “Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer,” arXiv:1701.06538, 2017.
[32] N. Shazeer, “Fast Transformer Decoding: One Write-Head is All You Need,” arXiv:1911.02150, 2019.
[33] P. Lewis et al., “Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks,” in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020.
[34] J. Su et al., “RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding,” arXiv:2104.09864, 2021.
[35] O. Press, N. A. Smith, and M. Lewis, “Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation,” arXiv:2108.12409, 2021.
[36] S. Bubeck et al., “Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early Experiments with GPT-4,” arXiv:2303.12712, 2023.
[37] OpenAI, “GPT-4 Technical Report,” arXiv:2303.08774, 2023.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.

Germany
United States of America
Italy
United Kingdom
France
Canada
Uzbekistan
Japan
Republic of Korea
Australia
Spain
Switzerland
Sweden
Netherlands
China
India