Attention has been a fairly popular concept and a useful tool in the deep learning. Attention is, to some extent, motivated by how we pay visual attention to different regions of an image or correlate words in one sentence. In a nutshell, attention in the deep learning can be broadly interpreted as a vector of importance weights: in order to predict or infer one element, such as a pixel in an image or a word in a sentence, we estimate using the attention vector how strongly it is correlated with (attends to) other elements and take the sum of their values weighted by the attention vector as the approximation of the target.
Attend. The verb attend means to be present, to listen, or give care or attention to. You can attend your family reunion, attend to a project you've been ignoring, orattend to your teacher's voice. When you use attend as "pay attention" or "take care of," it's followed by "to."