Related papers: Length Generalization of Causal Transformers witho…
Despite the success of Transformers on language understanding, code generation, and logical reasoning, they still fail to generalize over length on basic arithmetic tasks such as addition and multiplication. A major reason behind this…
Training large language models to predict beyond their training context lengths has drawn much attention in recent years, yet the principles driving such behavior of length generalization remain underexplored. We propose a new theoretical…
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…
Extending large language models (LLMs) to process longer inputs is crucial for a wide range of applications. However, the substantial computational cost of transformers and limited generalization of positional encoding restrict the size of…
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…
Relative Positional Encoding (RPE), which encodes the relative distance between any pair of tokens, is one of the most successful modifications to the original Transformer. As far as we know, theoretical understanding of the RPE-based…
Transformer-based language models rely on positional encoding (PE) to handle token order and support context length extrapolation. However, existing PE methods lack theoretical clarity and rely on limited evaluation metrics to substantiate…
Transformer language models have demonstrated impressive generalization capabilities in natural language domains, yet we lack a fine-grained understanding of how such generalization arises. In this paper, we investigate length…
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…
Without positional information, attention-based Transformer neural networks are permutation-invariant. Absolute or relative positional embeddings are the most popular ways to feed Transformer models with positional information. Absolute…
Transformers often struggle to generalize to longer sequences than those seen during training, a limitation known as length extrapolation. Most existing Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) methods attempt to address this by introducing…
Embedding models play a pivot role in modern NLP applications such as IR and RAG. While the context limit of LLMs has been pushed beyond 1 million tokens, embedding models are still confined to a narrow context window not exceeding 8k…
Positional encoding mechanisms enable Transformers to model sequential structure and long-range dependencies in text. While absolute positional encodings struggle with extrapolation to longer sequences due to fixed positional…
The ability to process ultra-long contexts is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to perform long-horizon tasks. While recent efforts have extended context windows to 1M and beyond, model performance degrades when sequence length…
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…
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to empirically improve Transformers' performance, and theoretically increase their expressivity to Turing completeness. However, whether Transformers can learn to generalize to CoT traces longer than…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, but their ability to process long sequences is fundamentally limited by the context window size during training. Existing length extrapolation methods often…
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…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…