The paper proposes an encoder Transformer that explicitly separates semantic, absolute positional (AP), and relative positional (RP) information, restricting the masked‑language‑modeling objective to the semantic stream. This disentanglement reveals that the AP subspace collapses into a low‑frequency two‑dimensional manifold reflecting document structure, that attention heads specialize into structure‑ and semantic‑oriented groups with RP supporting only the latter, and that standard positional encodings fail to robustly encode macroscopic structure. The approach preserves positional encoding and improves performance on 49 out of 65 linguistic phenomena in the Flash‑Holmes probing benchmark.
arXiv:2609.38109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The attention operation is naively position invariant. However, positional information is fundamental to natural language, and therefore a variety of...
arXiv:2509. 10534v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where.
arXiv:2608. 06111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Positional embeddings (PE) in Transformers encode token distance and order but are largely agnostic to \textit{syntactic structure}.
arXiv:2609.38530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly use architectures that vary attention span and positional encoding across layers, such as applying RoPE with sliding-windo...
arXiv:2610.07848v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become a standard approach for adapting large language models to downstream tasks. However, most existing...
arXiv:2511. 17388v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Position information is essential for language modeling.
arXiv:2606. 06160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RoPE-trained transformers distinguish absolute position in their attention patterns, even though RoPE encodes only relative offsets in the inner product.
arXiv:2605.01609v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We find that transformer concept representations systematically anti-concentrate in the spectral tail of the unembedding covariance, encoding...
The study examined whether brain-language model alignment reflects shared computational mechanisms or merely stable lexical‑semantic correspondences. Using whole‑brain encoding across Mandarin, English, and French, transformer representations predicted activity in a distributed network that overlapped across languages and remained stable across layers. Contextual embeddings and measures of prediction or compression did not outperform static lexical embeddings, suggesting that alignment is robust but not informative about shared computational processes.
The paper uncovers a systematic mismatch in modern text embeddings: while sentiment can be extracted with high accuracy from frozen encoders, the embeddings’ cosine similarity metric barely reflects polarity differences. Across eleven models from 2021–2026, a linear probe achieves up to 91.3% accuracy, yet cosine similarity margins are only 0.003–0.064, leading to poor retrieval performance (e.g., Qwen3-Embedding-4B’s 64.3 MAP). Introducing a lightweight supervised‑contrastive head (Sentiment‑Injected Sentence Embeddings) dramatically improves probe accuracy, retrieval MAP, and polarity margins, but at the cost of downstream semantic similarity. "whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that widely used retrieval and clustering systems may ignore valuable sentiment information encoded in embeddings, impacting their effectiveness."
arXiv:2608.30725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent multilingual vision--language encoders cover hundreds of languages in a single model, yet on two state-of-the-art instances retrieval on low-res...
The paper introduces GAPE (Gated Adaptive Positional Encoding), a drop‑in augmentation for rotary positional encodings that adds content‑aware bias to attention logits while preserving rotary geometry. GAPE uses a query‑dependent gate to contract irrelevant context and a key‑dependent gate to keep salient distant tokens, leading to exponential attenuation of weakly protected context. Experiments show that GAPE improves long‑context robustness, extrapolating up to eight times the training length, and can be retrofitted into a pretrained 7B model without losing benchmark performance.