end

Definition

Nearly always part of "end-to-end": one model spanning raw input to final output, trained jointly under a single objective. The contrast is a pipeline of separately optimised stages, where each stage's errors feed the next and no stage optimises what you actually care about. The trade is inspectability — when an end-to-end system fails there is no intermediate output to examine and no module to blame.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: SAS — Training a Sparse-Attention Block Selector End-to-End With the Language Modeling LossSAS: Simple Attention Sparsification via End-to-End Optimization of Context Ranking
• Paper Walkthrough: Motion-Omni — Speaking and Moving in One Forward PassMotion-Omni: End-to-End Joint Speech and Full-Body Motion for Spoken Dialogue
• Neural Compression — The Codec That LearnsEnd-to-end Optimized Image Compression

In the textbook

• Scaling Laws and Their End