arXiv Machine Learning

Disentangling the Expressivity of RoPE

arXiv:2608. 11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two accounts recur in explanations of the success of rotary position embeddings (RoPE).

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Content-Based Addressing for Long Context

The paper proposes a content‑based addressing scheme for long‑context models that replaces the growing token counter in Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) with unit‑level addresses derived from the content of each unit. By dividing the token stream into units, the method preserves local RoPE behavior while allowing new units to be addressed via learned content maps, avoiding positional mismatches when extending context length. Experiments on character‑level Tiny Shakespeare show that a model trained on 256‑character contexts achieves lower perplexity at 4096 characters using this scheme, and a second diagnostic demonstrates retrieval of multiple serialized facts.

By Mahesh Godavarti
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 1

Rethinking the Role of Positional Encoding: Sliding-Window Transformers without PE Remain Turing Complete

Positional encoding (PE) is widely viewed as necessary for transformers to process ordered sequences: without them, the next-token map appears permutation-invariant in its context tokens. This intuition underlies all prior universality results, which rely on positional information to prove that transformers with chain-of-thought can perform arbitrary computation, i.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

arXiv:2511. 17388v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Position information is essential for language modeling.

By Sajad Movahedi, Timur Carstensen, Arshia Afzal, Frank Hutter, Antonio Orvieto, Volkan Cevher
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Phase Structure in Rotary Attention: A Spectral Framework for Semantic Continuity and Execution-Boundary Governance

The paper introduces a bounded spectral framework to analyze rotary attention in transformer language models, focusing on phase alignment, hidden‑state continuity, and semantic drift. It identifies ordered hidden‑state sequences as suitable domains for spectral decomposition, derives the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) attention score as a sum of magnitude‑weighted cosine terms, and proves a local stability lemma linking bounded phase displacement to pre‑softmax score degradation. By defining complex modal coordinates and a weighted coherence functional, the work distinguishes representational continuity from execution‑boundary admissibility, offering a theoretical program for when spectral structure explains continuity and when external governance is required.

By Abraham Chachamovits