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Transformers have emerged as a universal backbone across 3D perception, video generation, and world models for autonomous driving and embodied AI, where understanding camera geometry is essential for grounding visual observations in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Cheng Zhang , Boying Li , Meng Wei , Yan-Pei Cao , Camilo Cruz Gambardella , Dinh Phung , Jianfei Cai

Relative Positional Encoding (RPE), which encodes the relative distance between any pair of tokens, is one of the most successful modifications to the original Transformer. As far as we know, theoretical understanding of the RPE-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Shengjie Luo , Shanda Li , Shuxin Zheng , Tie-Yan Liu , Liwei Wang , Di He

Positional encoding (PE) underpins how permutation-invariant Transformers represent sequence order, yet how positional information is processed and stored remains poorly understood. Modern PE methods such as RoPE still struggle on tasks…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Pierre-Antoine Lequeu , Camille Barboule , Benjamin Piwowarski

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…

We study positional encodings for multi-view transformers that process tokens from a set of posed input images, and seek a mechanism that encodes patches uniquely, allows $SE(3)$-invariant attention with multi-frequency similarity, and can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yu Wu , Minsik Jeon , Jen-Hao Rick Chang , Oncel Tuzel , Shubham Tulsiani

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

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

Vision Transformers have achieved remarkable success in computer vision, but their common use of learnable one-dimensional positional encodings weakens the inherent two-dimensional spatial structure of images after patch flattening.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Zhihang Xin , Rui Wang , Xitong Hu , Xiaojun Wu

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in large language models, but when applied to vision-language models (VLMs) it couples text and image position indices and can introduce spurious cross-modal relative-position bias. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Chengcheng Wang , Jianyuan Guo , Hongguang Li , Yuchuan Tian , Ying Nie , Chang Xu , Kai Han

We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data. We find…

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has shown strong performance in text-based Large Language Models (LLMs), but extending it to video remains a challenge due to the intricate spatiotemporal structure of video frames. Existing adaptations,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Zikang Liu , Longteng Guo , Yepeng Tang , Tongtian Yue , Junxian Cai , Kai Ma , Qingbin Liu , Xi Chen , Jing Liu

Positional Encodings (PEs) are a critical component of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), providing the attention mechanism with important sequence-position information. One of the most popular types of encoding used today in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Federico Barbero , Alex Vitvitskyi , Christos Perivolaropoulos , Razvan Pascanu , Petar Veličković

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

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

Multimodal position encoding is essential for vision-language models, yet there has been little systematic investigation into multimodal position encoding. We conduct a comprehensive analysis of multimodal Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Jie Huang , Xuejing Liu , Sibo Song , Ruibing Hou , Hong Chang , Junyang Lin , Shuai Bai

We introduce STRING: Separable Translationally Invariant Position Encodings. STRING extends Rotary Position Encodings, a recently proposed and widely used algorithm in large language models, via a unifying theoretical framework.…

In transformer architectures, position encoding primarily provides a sense of sequence for input tokens. While the original transformer paper's method has shown satisfactory results in general language processing tasks, there have been new…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Eren Unlu

We introduce Perception Encoder (PE), a state-of-the-art vision encoder for image and video understanding trained via simple vision-language learning. Traditionally, vision encoders have relied on a variety of pretraining objectives, each…

Transformer-based methods have swept the benchmarks on 2D and 3D detection on images. Because tokenization before the attention mechanism drops the spatial information, positional encoding becomes critical for those methods. Recent works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-31 Changyong Shu , JIajun Deng , Fisher Yu , Yifan Liu

Recurrent models have been dominating the field of neural machine translation (NMT) for the past few years. Transformers \citep{vaswani2017attention}, have radically changed it by proposing a novel architecture that relies on a feed-forward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Joyce Zheng , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Peyman Passban