English
Related papers

Related papers: Impact of Positional Encoding: Clean and Adversari…

200 papers

Designing effective positional encodings for graphs is key to building powerful graph transformers and enhancing message-passing graph neural networks. Although widespread, using Laplacian eigenvectors as positional encodings faces two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Yinan Huang , William Lu , Joshua Robinson , Yu Yang , Muhan Zhang , Stefanie Jegelka , Pan Li

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Adi Haviv , Ori Ram , Ofir Press , Peter Izsak , Omer Levy

Positional encoding has become a standard component in graph learning, especially for graph Transformers and other models that must distinguish structurally similar nodes, yet its fundamental identifiability remains poorly understood. In…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Zimo Yan , Zheng Xie , Chang Liu , Yiqin Lv , Runfan Duan

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Anand Gopalakrishnan , Robert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber , Michael C. Mozer

Position encoding (PE), an essential part of self-attention networks (SANs), is used to preserve the word order information for natural language processing tasks, generating fixed position indices for input sequences. However, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Liang Ding , Longyue Wang , Dacheng Tao

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xi Chen , Shiyang Zhou , Muqi Huang , Jiaxu Feng , Yun Xiong , Kun Zhou , Biao Yang , Yuhui Zhang , Huishuai Bao , Sijia Peng , Chuan Li , Feng Shi

In-context learning (ICL) refers to a remarkable capability of pretrained large language models, which can learn a new task given a few examples during inference. However, theoretical understanding of ICL is largely under-explored,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

We consider a model of robust learning in an adversarial environment. The learner gets uncorrupted training data with access to possible corruptions that may be affected by the adversary during testing. The learner's goal is to build a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-04 Idan Attias , Aryeh Kontorovich , Yishay Mansour

Position encoding is the primary mechanism which induces notion of sequential order for input tokens in transformer architectures. Even though this formulation in the original transformer paper has yielded plausible performance for general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Eren Unlu

Recently, a unified model for image-to-image translation tasks within adversarial learning framework has aroused widespread research interests in computer vision practitioners. Their reported empirical success however lacks solid…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-20 Xudong Pan , Mi Zhang , Daizong Ding

Adversarial training is widely acknowledged as the most effective defense against adversarial attacks. However, it is also well established that achieving both robustness and generalization in adversarially trained models involves a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Enes Altinisik , Hassan Sajjad , Husrev Taha Sencar , Safa Messaoud , Sanjay Chawla

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Aleksis Datseris , Sylvia Vassileva , Ivan Koychev , Svetla Boytcheva

Adversarial training is an approach for increasing model's resilience against adversarial perturbations. Such approaches have been demonstrated to result in models with feature representations that generalize better. However, limited works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Tianjin Huang , Yulong Pei , Vlado Menkovski , Mykola Pechenizkiy

The growth of highly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) constitutes a huge dual-use problem, making it necessary to create dependable AI-generated text detection systems. Modern detectors are notoriously vulnerable to adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Lekkala Sai Teja , Annepaka Yadagiri , Sangam Sai Anish , Siva Gopala Krishna Nuthakki , Partha Pakray

We study the extent to which rotary position encodings (RoPE), a recent transformer position encoding algorithm broadly adopted in large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers (ViTs), can be applied to graph-structured data. We find…

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

Existing studies have shown that Message-Passing Graph Neural Networks (MPNNs) are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks. In contrast, despite the increasing importance of Graph Transformers (GTs), their robustness properties are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Philipp Foth , Lukas Gosch , Simon Geisler , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

In an unsupervised attack on variational autoencoders (VAEs), an adversary finds a small perturbation in an input sample that significantly changes its latent space encoding, thereby compromising the reconstruction for a fixed decoder. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Asif Khan , Amos Storkey

We identify intrinsic limitations of Rotary Positional Embeddings (RoPE) in Transformer-based long-context language models. Our theoretical analysis abstracts away from the specific content of the context and depends only on its length. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yufeng Du , Phillip Harris , Minyang Tian , Eliu A Huerta , Srikanth Ronanki , Subendhu Rongali , Aram Galstyan , Hao Peng

Several studies have reported the inability of Transformer models to generalize compositionally, a key type of generalization in many NLP tasks such as semantic parsing. In this paper we explore the design space of Transformer models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Santiago Ontañón , Joshua Ainslie , Vaclav Cvicek , Zachary Fisher