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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…

Transformers, central to the successes in modern Natural Language Processing, often falter on arithmetic tasks despite their vast capabilities --which paradoxically include remarkable coding abilities. We observe that a crucial challenge is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Ruoqi Shen , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Yin Tat Lee , Yuanzhi Li , Yi Zhang

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

Even for simple arithmetic tasks like integer addition, it is challenging for Transformers to generalize to longer sequences than those encountered during training. To tackle this problem, we propose position coupling, a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Pranjal Awasthi , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Anupam Gupta , Chulhee Yun

Length generalization, defined as the ability to extrapolate from shorter training sequences to longer test ones, is a significant challenge for language models. This issue persists even with large-scale Transformers handling relatively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Yongchao Zhou , Uri Alon , Xinyun Chen , Xuezhi Wang , Rishabh Agarwal , Denny Zhou

A major challenge for transformers is generalizing to sequences longer than those observed during training. While previous works have empirically shown that transformers can either succeed or fail at length generalization depending on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Xinting Huang , Andy Yang , Satwik Bhattamishra , Yash Sarrof , Andreas Krebs , Hattie Zhou , Preetum Nakkiran , Michael Hahn

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun

We examine how transformers cope with two challenges: learning basic integer arithmetic, and generalizing to longer sequences than seen during training. We find that relative position embeddings enable length generalization for simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Samy Jelassi , Stéphane d'Ascoli , Carles Domingo-Enrich , Yuhuai Wu , Yuanzhi Li , François Charton

Length generalization is the ability of language models to maintain performance on inputs longer than those seen during pretraining. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful position encoding (PE) strategy, Random Float Sampling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Atsushi Shimizu , Shohei Taniguchi , Yutaka Matsuo

Transformer-based models excel in various tasks but their generalization capabilities, especially in arithmetic reasoning, remain incompletely understood. Arithmetic tasks provide a controlled framework to explore these capabilities, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xingcheng Xu , Zibo Zhao , Haipeng Zhang , Yanqing Yang

Transformer network architecture has proven effective in speech enhancement. However, as its core module, self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity, making it infeasible for training on long speech utterances. In practical scenarios,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-10 Qiquan Zhang , Hongxu Zhu , Xinyuan Qian , Eliathamby Ambikairajah , Haizhou Li

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

The ability to perform arithmetic tasks is a remarkable trait of human intelligence and might form a critical component of more complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate if the surface form of a number has any influence on how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Rodrigo Nogueira , Zhiying Jiang , Jimmy Lin

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

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

Built upon the Transformer, large language models (LLMs) have captured worldwide attention due to their remarkable abilities. Nevertheless, all Transformer-based models including LLMs suffer from a preset length limit and can hardly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Liang Zhao , Xiachong Feng , Xiaocheng Feng , Weihong Zhong , Dongliang Xu , Qing Yang , Hongtao Liu , Bing Qin , Ting 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

The use of Transformer architectures has facilitated remarkable progress in speech enhancement. Training Transformers using substantially long speech utterances is often infeasible as self-attention suffers from quadratic complexity. It is…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-06-18 Qiquan Zhang , Hongxu Zhu , Xinyuan Qian , Eliathamby Ambikairajah , Haizhou Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Tatiana Likhomanenko , Qiantong Xu , Gabriel Synnaeve , Ronan Collobert , Alex Rogozhnikov

Transformer models have advanced the state of the art in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present a new Transformer architecture, Extended Transformer Construction (ETC), that addresses two key challenges of…

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