Related papers: Your Transformer May Not be as Powerful as You Exp…

We propose a novel positional encoding for learning graph on Transformer architecture. Existing approaches either linearize a graph to encode absolute position in the sequence of nodes, or encode relative position with another node using…

We propose a new class of linear Transformers called FourierLearner-Transformers (FLTs), which incorporate a wide range of relative positional encoding mechanisms (RPEs). These include regular RPE techniques applied for sequential data, as…

Transformer models are powerful sequence-to-sequence architectures that are capable of directly mapping speech inputs to transcriptions or translations. However, the mechanism for modeling positions in this model was tailored for text…

Recently, Transformer networks have redefined the state of the art in many NLP tasks. However, these models suffer from quadratic computational cost in the input sequence length $n$ to compute pairwise attention in each layer. This has…

Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N^2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have…

In recent years, the Transformer architecture has proven to be very successful in sequence processing, but its application to other data structures, such as graphs, has remained limited due to the difficulty of properly defining positions.…

Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then…

Transformer architectures rely on position encodings to model the spatial structure of input data. Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) is a widely used method in language models that encodes relative positions through fixed, block-diagonal,…

Previous work on the learnability of transformers \textemdash\ focused primarily on examining their ability to approximate specific algorithmic patterns through training \textemdash\ has largely been data-driven, offering only probabilistic…

Built upon the Transformer, large language models (LLMs) have captured worldwide attention due to their remarkable abilities. Nevertheless, all Transformer-based models including LLMs suffer from a preset length limit and can hardly…

Rotary Positional Encodings (RoPE) have emerged as a highly effective technique for one-dimensional sequences in Natural Language Processing spurring recent progress towards generalizing RoPE to higher-dimensional data such as images and…

Recurrent Neural Networks have long been the dominating choice for sequence modeling. However, it severely suffers from two issues: impotent in capturing very long-term dependencies and unable to parallelize the sequential computation…

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

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…

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

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…

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…

Characterizing the express power of the Transformer architecture is critical to understanding its capacity limits and scaling law. Recent works provide the circuit complexity bounds to Transformer-like architecture. On the other hand,…

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…

Positional encoding is essential for large language models (LLMs) to represent sequence order, yet recent studies show that Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) can induce massive activation. We investigate the source of these instabilities via…