Related papers: ExPe: Exact Positional Encodings for Generative Tr…
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…
In this study, we investigate the impact of positional encoding (PE) on source separation performance and the generalization ability to long sequences (length extrapolation) in Transformer-based time-frequency (TF) domain dual-path models.…
Position representation is crucial for building position-aware representations in Transformers. Existing position representations suffer from a lack of generalization to test data with unseen lengths or high computational cost. We…
The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where. We present an analysis indicating that what and where are entangled in the popular RoPE…
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…
Large language models (LLMs), although having revolutionized many fields, still suffer from the challenging extrapolation problem, where the inference ability of LLMs sharply declines beyond their max training lengths. In this work, we…
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…
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,…
Vision transformers have demonstrated significant advantages in computer vision tasks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and contextual relationships through self-attention. However, existing position encoding…
Transformer models are permutation equivariant. To supply the order and type information of the input tokens, position and segment embeddings are usually added to the input. Recent works proposed variations of positional encodings with…
Positional encodings are a core part of transformer-based models, enabling processing of sequential data without recurrence. This paper presents a theoretical framework to analyze how various positional encoding methods, including…
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…
We introduce a novel positional encoding strategy for Transformer-style models, addressing the shortcomings of existing, often ad hoc, approaches. Our framework provides a flexible mapping from the algebraic specification of a domain to an…
In Transformer-based architectures, the attention mechanism is inherently permutation-invariant with respect to the input sequence's tokens. To impose sequential order, token positions are typically encoded using a scheme with either fixed…
An ideal length-extrapolatable Transformer language model can handle sequences longer than the training length without any fine-tuning. Such long-context utilization capability relies heavily on a flexible positional embedding design. Upon…
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…
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…
We propose Parabolic Position Encoding (PaPE), a parabola-based position encoding for vision modalities in attention-based architectures. Given a set of vision tokens-such as from videos, event camera streams, images, or point clouds-our…
Preventing the performance decay of Transformers on inputs longer than those used for training has been an important challenge in extending the context length of these models. Though the Transformer architecture has fundamentally no limits…
Relative position embedding has become a standard mechanism for encoding positional information in Transformers. However, existing formulations are typically limited to a fixed geometric space, namely 1D sequences or regular 2D/3D grids,…