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Positional embeddings (PE) play a crucial role in Vision Transformers (ViTs) by providing spatial information otherwise lost due to the permutation invariant nature of self attention. While absolute positional embeddings (APE) have shown…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Md Abtahi Majeed Chowdhury , Md Rifat Ur Rahman , Akil Ahmad Taki

There are several improvements proposed over the baseline Absolute Positional Encoding (APE) method used in original transformer. In this study, we aim to investigate the implications of inadequately representing positional encoding in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Arpit Aggarwal

Positional encoding is a vital component of Transformer architectures, enabling models to incorporate sequence order into self-attention mechanisms. Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) have become a widely adopted solution due to their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Ali Veisi , Delaram Fartoot , Hamidreza Amirzadeh

Vision transformers have demonstrated significant advantages in computer vision tasks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships through self-attention. However, existing position encoding…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xi Chen , Shiyang Zhou , Muqi Huang , Jiaxu Feng , Yun Xiong , Kun Zhou , Biao Yang , Yuhui Zhang , Huishuai Bao , Sijia Peng , Chuan Li , Feng Shi

In Transformer-based architectures, the attention mechanism is inherently permutation-invariant with respect to the input sequence's tokens. To impose sequential order, token positions are typically encoded using a scheme with either fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Giorgio Angelotti

Length generalization, the ability to generalize from small training context sizes to larger ones, is a critical challenge in the development of Transformer-based language models. Positional encoding (PE) has been identified as a major…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Amirhossein Kazemnejad , Inkit Padhi , Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy , Payel Das , Siva Reddy

In Transformers, Position Embeddings (PEs) significantly influence Length Generalization (LG) performance, yet their fundamental role remains unclear. In this work, we investigate the limitations and capabilities of PEs in achieving LG. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yang Chen , Yitao Liang , Zhouchen Lin

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yu Wang , Sheng Shen , Rémi Munos , Hongyuan Zhan , Yuandong Tian

We conducted empirical experiments to assess the transferability of a light curve transformer to datasets with different cadences and magnitude distributions using various positional encodings (PEs). We proposed a new approach to…

The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular RoPE…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Anand Gopalakrishnan , Robert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber , Michael C. Mozer

The distinguishing power of graph transformers is closely tied to the choice of positional encoding: features used to augment the base transformer with information about the graph. There are two primary types of positional encoding:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-26 Mitchell Black , Zhengchao Wan , Gal Mishne , Amir Nayyeri , Yusu Wang

Transformers rely on positional encoding to compensate for the inherent permutation invariance of self-attention. Traditional approaches use absolute sinusoidal embeddings or learned positional vectors, while more recent methods emphasize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chase van de Geijn , Ayush Paliwal , Timo Lüddecke , Alexander S. Ecker

Relative position embedding has become a standard mechanism for encoding positional information in Transformers. However, existing formulations are typically limited to a fixed geometric space, namely 1D sequences or regular 2D/3D grids,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Yichen Xie , Depu Meng , Chensheng Peng , Yihan Hu , Quentin Herau , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

We propose Parabolic Position Encoding (PaPE), a parabola-based position encoding for vision modalities in attention-based architectures. Given a set of vision tokens-such as from videos, event camera streams, images, or point clouds-our…

In this paper, we address the problem of detecting 3D objects from multi-view images. Current query-based methods rely on global 3D position embeddings (PE) to learn the geometric correspondence between images and 3D space. We claim that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Kaixin Xiong , Shi Gong , Xiaoqing Ye , Xiao Tan , Ji Wan , Errui Ding , Jingdong Wang , Xiang Bai

The Position Embedding (PE) is critical for Vision Transformers (VTs) due to the permutation-invariance of self-attention operation. By analyzing the input and output of each encoder layer in VTs using reparameterization and visualization,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-23 Runyi Yu , Zhennan Wang , Yinhuai Wang , Kehan Li , Yian Zhao , Jian Zhang , Guoli Song , Jie Chen

Transformer has shown promising results in many sequence to sequence transformation tasks recently. It utilizes a number of feed-forward self-attention layers to replace the recurrent neural networks (RNN) in attention-based encoder decoder…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Pan Zhou , Ruchao Fan , Wei Chen , Jia Jia

Transformers often struggle to generalize to longer sequences than those seen during training, a limitation known as length extrapolation. Most existing Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) methods attempt to address this by introducing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Ali Veisi , Hamidreza Amirzadeh , Amir Mansourian

Rotary Positional Encoding (RoPE) is widely used in modern large language models. However, when sequences are extended beyond the range seen during training, rotary phases can enter out-of-distribution regimes, leading to spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Riccardo Ali , Alessio Borgi , Christopher Irwin , Mario Severino , Pietro Liò

We propose a conditional positional encoding (CPE) scheme for vision Transformers. Unlike previous fixed or learnable positional encodings, which are pre-defined and independent of input tokens, CPE is dynamically generated and conditioned…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Xiangxiang Chu , Zhi Tian , Bo Zhang , Xinlong Wang , Chunhua Shen