transformer

noun4

1. •
   Something that transforms, changing its own or another thing's shape.
2. •
   A static device that transfers electric energy from one circuit to another by magnetic coupling; primarily used to transfer energy between different voltage levels, which allows the most appropriate voltages for power generation, transmission and distribution to be chosen separately.

   • While initial reports Thursday traced the glow to a transformer explosion or a fire, Mr. McGee said there was no fire, and there were no transformers involved. — 2018
3. •
   A neural network architecture composed of layers of attention which takes sequences of tokens (representing text, images, audio, or other modalities) as input.

   • Transformer is a deep machine learning model based on the encoder–decoder network architecture and is used primarily in the field of NLP. — 2021
4. •
   (slang, offensive) A transgender person.

noun2

1. •
   In the Transformers franchise, any of the alien humanoid robots that can mechanically alter their appearance, or "transform", into a vehicle, creature, or (rarely) a tool.

   • “It's like a Transformer today,” Stamm said. “It appears as one thing, then becomes another.” — 2015
2. •
   A toy in the Transformers toyline which has mechanical parts that allow it to be altered in appearance from its original form as a humanoid robot action figure to another form, usually a vehicle, depending on the toy.