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Related papers: The Locality and Symmetry of Positional Encodings

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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

Position encoding (PE), an essential part of self-attention networks (SANs), is used to preserve the word order information for natural language processing tasks, generating fixed position indices for input sequences. However, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Dacheng Tao

In this work, we investigate the positional encoding methods used in language pre-training (e.g., BERT) and identify several problems in the existing formulations. First, we show that in the absolute positional encoding, the addition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Guolin Ke , Di He , Tie-Yan Liu

In transformers, the positional encoding (PE) provides essential information that distinguishes the position and order amongst tokens in a sequence. Most prior investigations of PE effects on generalization were tailored to 1D input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Takuya Ito , Luca Cocchi , Tim Klinger , Parikshit Ram , Murray Campbell , Luke Hearne

Transformer architecture has enabled recent progress in speech enhancement. Since Transformers are position-agostic, positional encoding is the de facto standard component used to enable Transformers to distinguish the order of elements in…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-15 Qiquan Zhang , Meng Ge , Hongxu Zhu , Eliathamby Ambikairajah , Qi Song , Zhaoheng Ni , Haizhou Li

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

Contemporary deep learning models effectively handle languages with diverse morphology despite not being directly integrated into them. Morphology and word order are closely linked, with the latter incorporated into transformer-based models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Poulami Ghosh , Shikhar Vashishth , Raj Dabre , Pushpak Bhattacharyya

This paper revisits the role of positional embeddings (PEs) within vision transformers (ViTs) from a geometric perspective. We show that PEs are not mere token indices but effectively function as geometric priors that shape the spatial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jian Shi , Michael Birsak , Wenqing Cui , Zhenyu Li , Peter Wonka

Neural language models process sequences of words, but the mathematical operations inside them are insensitive to the order in which words appear. Positional encodings are the component added to remedy this. Despite their importance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Giansalvo Cirrincione

We conducted empirical experiments to assess the transferability of a light curve transformer to datasets with different cadences and magnitude distributions using various positional encodings (PEs). We proposed a new approach to…

Causal transformer language models (LMs), such as GPT-3, typically require some form of positional encoding, such as positional embeddings. However, we show that LMs without any explicit positional encoding are still competitive with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Adi Haviv , Ori Ram , Ofir Press , Peter Izsak , Omer Levy

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

Language Models (LMs) have shown state-of-the-art performance in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Downstream tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) or Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging are known to suffer from data imbalance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-12 Mehdi Ben Amor , Michael Granitzer , Jelena Mitrović

Position encoding is the primary mechanism which induces notion of sequential order for input tokens in transformer architectures. Even though this formulation in the original transformer paper has yielded plausible performance for general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Eren Unlu

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

In order to preserve word-order information in a non-autoregressive setting, transformer architectures tend to include positional knowledge, by (for instance) adding positional encodings to token embeddings. Several modifications have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Vinit Ravishankar , Anders Søgaard

Transformer language models encode the notion of word order using positional information. Most commonly, this positional information is represented by absolute position embeddings (APEs), that are learned from the pretraining data. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Koustuv Sinha , Amirhossein Kazemnejad , Siva Reddy , Joelle Pineau , Dieuwke Hupkes , Adina Williams

Positional encodings (PEs) are essential for building powerful and expressive graph neural networks and graph transformers, as they effectively capture the relative spatial relationships between nodes. Although extensive research has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yinan Huang , Haoyu Wang , Pan Li

Tables are ubiquitous across various domains for concisely representing structured information. Empowering large language models (LLMs) to reason over tabular data represents an actively explored direction. However, since typical LLMs only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Jia-Nan Li , Jian Guan , Wei Wu , Zhengtao Yu , Rui Yan

Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of position encoding in transformer architectures. By incorporating positional information, this approach provides essential guidance for modeling dependencies between elements across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Avinash Amballa
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