English
Related papers

Related papers: Exploring Transformer Extrapolation

200 papers

Position encoding recently has shown effective in the transformer architecture. It enables valuable supervision for dependency modeling between elements at different positions of the sequence. In this paper, we first investigate various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Jianlin Su , Yu Lu , Shengfeng Pan , Ahmed Murtadha , Bo Wen , Yunfeng Liu

Recent advances in Transformer models allow for unprecedented sequence lengths, due to linear space and time complexity. In the meantime, relative positional encoding (RPE) was proposed as beneficial for classical Transformers and consists…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Antoine Liutkus , Ondřej Cífka , Shih-Lun Wu , Umut Şimşekli , Yi-Hsuan Yang , Gaël Richard

This paper studies how Transformer models with Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) develop emergent, wavelet-like properties that compensate for the positional encoding's theoretical limitations. Through an analysis spanning model scales,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Valeria Ruscio , Umberto Nanni , Fabrizio Silvestri

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Bo Chen , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Jiangxuan Long , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

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…

The ability to extrapolate from short problem instances to longer ones is an important form of out-of-distribution generalization in reasoning tasks, and is crucial when learning from datasets where longer problem instances are rare. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Cem Anil , Yuhuai Wu , Anders Andreassen , Aitor Lewkowycz , Vedant Misra , Vinay Ramasesh , Ambrose Slone , Guy Gur-Ari , Ethan Dyer , Behnam Neyshabur

Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Jie Wang , Tao Ji , Yuanbin Wu , Hang Yan , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang , Xiaoling Wang

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

Long-context modeling presents a significant challenge for transformer-based large language models (LLMs) due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism and issues with length extrapolation caused by pretraining exclusively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Chenghao Yang , Zi Yang , Nan Hua

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

Transformers have impressive generalization capabilities on tasks with a fixed context length. However, they fail to generalize to sequences of arbitrary length, even for seemingly simple tasks such as duplicating a string. Moreover, simply…

Deep sequence models typically degrade in accuracy when test sequences significantly exceed their training lengths, yet many critical tasks--such as algorithmic reasoning, multi-step arithmetic, and compositional generalization--require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Philip Heejun Lee

An ideal length-extrapolatable Transformer language model can handle sequences longer than the training length without any fine-tuning. Such long-context utilization capability relies heavily on a flexible positional embedding design. Upon…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Ta-Chung Chi , Ting-Han Fan , Alexander I. Rudnicky

Since self-attention layers in Transformers are permutation invariant by design, positional encodings must be explicitly incorporated to enable spatial understanding. However, fixed-size lookup tables used in traditional learnable position…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Huayang Li , Yahui Liu , Hongyu Sun , Deng Cai , Leyang Cui , Wei Bi , Peilin Zhao , Taro Watanabe

Transformers suffer from the computational overhead of their quadratic dependence on the length of sequences processed. We present three methods, all adding an intermediate step between training and inference/generation, which extend the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 R. I. Cukier

Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence architectures, while achieving state-of-the-art results on a large number of NLP tasks, can still suffer from overfitting during training. In practice, this is usually countered either by applying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Dušan Variš , Ondřej Bojar

Since the introduction of the transformer model by Vaswani et al. (2017), a fundamental question has yet to be answered: how does a model achieve extrapolation at inference time for sequences that are longer than it saw during training? We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Ofir Press , Noah A. Smith , Mike Lewis

Transformer-based end-to-end speech recognition models have received considerable attention in recent years due to their high training speed and ability to model a long-range global context. Position embedding in the transformer…

Sound · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Shengqiang Li , Menglong Xu , Xiao-Lei Zhang

Many recent text-to-speech (TTS) systems are built on transformer architectures and employ cross-attention mechanisms for text-speech alignment. Within these systems, rotary position embedding (RoPE) is commonly used to encode positional…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-16 Hyeongju Kim , Juheon Lee , Jinhyeok Yang , Jacob Morton

Retrieval-augmented language models (LMs) have received much attention recently. However, typically the retriever is not trained jointly as a native component of the LM, but added post-hoc to an already-pretrained LM, which limits the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Ohad Rubin , Jonathan Berant