Related papers: Positional Description Matters for Transformers Ar…
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…
In Transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT), the positional encoding mechanism helps the self-attention networks to learn the source representation with order dependency, which makes the Transformer-based NMT achieve…
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…
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…
Word order, an essential property of natural languages, is injected in Transformer-based neural language models using position encoding. However, recent experiments have shown that explicit position encoding is not always useful, since some…
Within numerical reasoning, understanding numbers themselves is still a challenge for existing language models. Simple generalisations, such as solving 100+200 instead of 1+2, can substantially affect model performance (Sivakumar and…
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…
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…
Large language models often struggle with length generalization and solving complex problem instances beyond their training distribution. We present a self-improvement approach where models iteratively generate and learn from their own…
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…
This paper introduces a novel approach to position embeddings in transformer models, named "Exact Positional Embeddings" (ExPE). An absolute positional embedding method that can extrapolate to sequences of lengths longer than the ones it…
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…
Error correction code is a major part of the communication physical layer, ensuring the reliable transfer of data over noisy channels. Recently, neural decoders were shown to outperform classical decoding techniques. However, the existing…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently make errors when handling even simple numerical problems, such as comparing two small numbers. A natural hypothesis is that these errors stem from how LLMs represent numbers, and specifically, whether…
Transformer-based language models often achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks while remaining fragile on basic numerical understanding and arithmetic operations. A central limitation is that numbers are processed as…
Transformers have revolutionized the world of deep learning, specially in the field of natural language processing. Recently, the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) was proposed for audio classification, leading to state of the art results…
Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we…
Transformer architectures rely on explicit position encodings in order to preserve a notion of word order. In this paper, we argue that existing work does not fully utilize position information. For example, the initial proposal of a…