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Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) is a common choice in transformer architectures for encoding relative positional information. Although earlier work has examined omitting RoPE in specific layers, the effect of varying the fraction of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mohammad Aflah Khan , Krishna P. Gummadi , Manish Gupta , Abhilasha Ravichander

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

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

Positional encoding plays a crucial role in transformers, significantly impacting model performance and length generalization. Prior research has introduced absolute positional encoding (APE) and relative positional encoding (RPE) to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Han Shi , Minbin Huang , Jingyao Li , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Michael Ng , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

Spatiotemporal data faces many analogous challenges to natural language text including the ordering of locations (words) in a sequence, long range dependencies between locations, and locations having multiple meanings. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Athanasios Tsiligkaridis , Nicholas Kalinowski , Zhongheng Li , Elizabeth Hou

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

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

Rotary positional embedding has become the state-of-the-art approach to encode position information in transformer-based models. While it is often succinctly expressed in complex linear algebra, we note that the actual implementation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Beicheng Lou , Zifei Xu , Vivian W. H. Wong

Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) have become the standard for Large Language Models (LLMs) due to their ability to encode relative positions through geometric rotation. However, we identify a significant limitation we term ''Spectral…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Kanishk Awadhiya

The attention mechanism is a core primitive in modern large language models (LLMs) and AI more broadly. Since attention by itself is permutation-invariant, position encoding is essential for modeling structured domains such as language.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Songlin Yang , Yikang Shen , Kaiyue Wen , Shawn Tan , Mayank Mishra , Liliang Ren , Rameswar Panda , Yoon Kim

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

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

This paper proposes a novel approach to word embeddings in Transformer models by utilizing spinors from geometric algebra. Spinors offer a rich mathematical framework capable of capturing complex relationships and transformations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Rick White

A common need for artificial intelligence models in the broader geoscience is to represent and encode various types of spatial data, such as points (e.g., points of interest), polylines (e.g., trajectories), polygons (e.g., administrative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Gengchen Mai , Krzysztof Janowicz , Yingjie Hu , Song Gao , Bo Yan , Rui Zhu , Ling Cai , Ni Lao

The Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) mechanism has become a powerful enhancement to the Transformer architecture, which enables models to capture token relationships when encoding positional information. However, the RoPE mechanisms make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yang Cao , Jiayan Huo , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

Graph Transformers (GTs) facilitate the comprehension of graph-structured data by calculating the self-attention of node pairs without considering node position information. To address this limitation, we introduce an innovative and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Kushal Bose , Swagatam Das

Attentional mechanisms are order-invariant. Positional encoding is a crucial component to allow attention-based deep model architectures such as Transformer to address sequences or images where the position of information matters. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Yang Li , Si Si , Gang Li , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Samy Bengio

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jing Xiong , Liyang Fan , Hui Shen , Zunhai Su , Min Yang , Lingpeng Kong , Ngai Wong

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus challenges AI systems to perform abstract reasoning with minimal training data, a task intuitive for humans but demanding for machine learning models. Using CodeT5+ as a case study, we demonstrate how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guilherme H. Bandeira Costa , Miguel Freire , Arlindo L. Oliveira

Transformer architectures have established strong baselines in time series forecasting, yet they typically rely on positional encodings that assume uniform, index-based temporal progression. However, real-world systems, from shifting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yubin Kim , Viresh Pati , Jevon Twitty , Vinh Pham , Shihao Yang , Jiecheng Lu