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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

In the realm of large-scale language models, a significant challenge arises when extrapolating sequences beyond the maximum allowable length. This is because the model's position embedding mechanisms are limited to positions encountered…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Yui Oka , Taku Hasegawa , Kyosuke Nishida , Kuniko Saito

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

Relative position encoding (RPE) is important for transformer to capture sequence ordering of input tokens. General efficacy has been proven in natural language processing. However, in computer vision, its efficacy is not well studied and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Kan Wu , Houwen Peng , Minghao Chen , Jianlong Fu , Hongyang Chao

Transformers rely on both content-based and position-based addressing mechanisms to make predictions, but existing positional encoding techniques often diminish the effectiveness of position-based addressing. Many current methods enforce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Jiajun Zhu , Peihao Wang , Ruisi Cai , Jason D. Lee , Pan Li , Zhangyang Wang

Large language models (LLMs), although having revolutionized many fields, still suffer from the challenging extrapolation problem, where the inference ability of LLMs sharply declines beyond their max training lengths. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Xin Ma , Yang Liu , Jingjing Liu , Xiaoxu Ma

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

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

Extending the context length of Language Models (LMs) by improving Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) has become a trend. While prior works mainly address RoPE's limitations within attention, this paper uncovers the adverse effects on length…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ermo Hua , Che Jiang , Xingtai Lv , Kaiyan Zhang , Youbang Sun , Yuchen Fan , Xuekai Zhu , Biqing Qi , Ning Ding , Bowen Zhou

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is the de facto positional encoding in large language models due to its ability to encode relative positions and support length extrapolation. When adapted to vision transformers, the standard axial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haoyu Liu , Sucheng Ren , Tingyu Zhu , Peng Wang , Cihang Xie , Alan Yuille , Zeyu Zheng , Feng Wang

Positional Encodings (PEs) are used to inject word-order information into transformer-based language models. While they can significantly enhance the quality of sentence representations, their specific contribution to language models is not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Lihu Chen , Gaël Varoquaux , Fabian M. Suchanek

Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) is a widely adopted technique for encoding position in language models, which, while effective, causes performance breakdown when input length exceeds training length. Prior analyses assert (rightly) that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Davis Wertheimer , Aozhong Zhang , Derrick Liu , Penghang Yin , Naigang Wang

Rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) are widely used in large language models to encode token positions through multiplicative rotations, yet their behavior at long context lengths remains poorly characterized. In this work, we reinterpret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Feilong Liu

The programming landscape is nowadays being reshaped by the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) able to automate code-related tasks related to code implementation (e.g., code completion) and comprehension (e.g., code summarization). Such…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Nathan Cooper , Rosalia Tufano , Gabriele Bavota , Denys Poshyvanyk

Transformers have demonstrated outstanding performance in many applications of deep learning. When applied to time series data, transformers require effective position encoding to capture the ordering of the time series data. The efficacy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Navid Mohammadi Foumani , Chang Wei Tan , Geoffrey I. Webb , Mahsa Salehi

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a widely used non-invasive technique for measuring brain activity in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications. Supervised EEG decoding models often struggle to generalize across tasks, subjects, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ayse Betul Yuce , Sebastian Stober

Transformers, central to the successes in modern Natural Language Processing, often falter on arithmetic tasks despite their vast capabilities --which paradoxically include remarkable coding abilities. We observe that a crucial challenge is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Ruoqi Shen , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Yin Tat Lee , Yuanzhi Li , Yi Zhang

The decoder-only Transformer architecture with causal masking and relative position encoding (RPE) has become the de facto choice in language modeling. Despite its exceptional performance across various tasks, we have identified two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Xiang Zhuang , Yu Zhao , Jianhua Yao , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

Positional Encodings (PEs) are essential for injecting structural information into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Transformers, yet their empirical impact remains insufficiently understood. We introduce a unified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Florian Grötschla , Jiaqing Xie , Roger Wattenhofer

Transformers often struggle with length generalization, meaning they fail to generalize to sequences longer than those encountered during training. While arithmetic tasks are commonly used to study length generalization, certain tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun