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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

Transformers rely on positional encoding to compensate for the inherent permutation invariance of self-attention. Traditional approaches use absolute sinusoidal embeddings or learned positional vectors, while more recent methods emphasize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Chase van de Geijn , Ayush Paliwal , Timo Lüddecke , Alexander S. Ecker

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

We prove under practical assumptions that Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) introduces an intrinsic distance-dependent bias in attention scores that limits RoPE's ability to model long-context. RoPE extension methods may alleviate this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yu Wang , Sheng Shen , Rémi Munos , Hongyuan Zhan , Yuandong Tian

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

Transformer architectures rely on position encodings to model the spatial structure of input data. Rotary Position Encoding (RoPE) is a widely used method in language models that encodes relative positions through fixed, block-diagonal,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Sophie Ostmeier , Brian Axelrod , Maya Varma , Michael E. Moseley , Akshay Chaudhari , Curtis Langlotz

We introduce Perception Encoder (PE), a state-of-the-art vision encoder for image and video understanding trained via simple vision-language learning. Traditionally, vision encoders have relied on a variety of pretraining objectives, each…

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

Vision transformers (ViTs) that model an image as a sequence of partitioned patches have shown notable performance in diverse vision tasks. Because partitioning patches eliminates the image structure, to reflect the order of patches, ViTs…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Bum Jun Kim , Hyeyeon Choi , Hyeonah Jang , Sang Woo Kim

The transformer architecture has been widely applied to many machine learning tasks. A main bottleneck in the time to perform transformer computations is a task called attention computation. [Alman and Song, NeurIPS 2023] have shown that in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Josh Alman , Zhao Song

Many positional encodings (PEs) are designed to exhibit long-term decay, based on an entrenched and long-standing inductive opinion: tokens farther away from the current position carry less relevant information. We argue that long-term…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Yuhan Chen , Ang Lv , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Wei Liu

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

We propose a self-supervised model producing 3D anatomical positional embeddings (APE) of individual medical image voxels. APE encodes voxels' anatomical closeness, i.e., voxels of the same organ or nearby organs always have closer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Mikhail Goncharov , Valentin Samokhin , Eugenia Soboleva , Roman Sokolov , Boris Shirokikh , Mikhail Belyaev , Anvar Kurmukov , Ivan Oseledets

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Huayang Li , Yahui Liu , Hongyu Sun , Deng Cai , Leyang Cui , Wei Bi , Peilin Zhao , Taro Watanabe

Position encoding recently has shown effective in the transformer architecture. It enables valuable supervision for dependency modeling between elements at different positions of the sequence. In this paper, we first investigate various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Jianlin Su , Yu Lu , Shengfeng Pan , Ahmed Murtadha , Bo Wen , Yunfeng Liu

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

Relative position encoding (RPE) is important for transformer to capture sequence ordering of input tokens. General efficacy has been proven in natural language processing. However, in computer vision, its efficacy is not well studied and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Kan Wu , Houwen Peng , Minghao Chen , Jianlong Fu , Hongyang Chao

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

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized various regions since it was proposed, and its effectiveness largely depends on the ability to encode positional information. Traditional position encoding methods exhibit significant…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Hao Yu , Tangyu Jiang , Shuning Jia , Shannan Yan , Shunning Liu , Haolong Qian , Guanghao Li , Shuting Dong , Huaisong Zhang , Chun Yuan

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