Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Assistant
AI Research Assistant
Well-researched responses based on relevant abstracts and paper content.
Custom Instructions Pro
Preferences or requirements that you'd like Emergent Mind to consider when generating responses.
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash 150 tok/s
Gemini 2.5 Pro 46 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 Medium 26 tok/s Pro
GPT-5 High 28 tok/s Pro
GPT-4o 80 tok/s Pro
Kimi K2 211 tok/s Pro
GPT OSS 120B 435 tok/s Pro
Claude Sonnet 4.5 35 tok/s Pro
2000 character limit reached

SeqPE: Transformer with Sequential Position Encoding (2506.13277v2)

Published 16 Jun 2025 in cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, and cs.CV

Abstract: 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 embeddings (PEs) limit extrapolation capabilities beyond pre-trained sequence lengths. Expert-designed methods such as ALiBi and RoPE, mitigate this limitation but demand extensive modifications for adapting to new modalities, underscoring fundamental challenges in adaptability and scalability. In this work, we present SeqPE, a unified and fully learnable position encoding framework that represents each $n$-dimensional position index as a symbolic sequence and employs a lightweight sequential position encoder to learn their embeddings in an end-to-end manner. To regularize SeqPE's embedding space, we introduce two complementary objectives: a contrastive objective that aligns embedding distances with a predefined position-distance function, and a knowledge distillation loss that anchors out-of-distribution position embeddings to in-distribution teacher representations, further enhancing extrapolation performance. Experiments across language modeling, long-context question answering, and 2D image classification demonstrate that SeqPE not only surpasses strong baselines in perplexity, exact match (EM), and accuracy--particularly under context length extrapolation--but also enables seamless generalization to multi-dimensional inputs without requiring manual architectural redesign. We release our code, data, and checkpoints at https://github.com/ghrua/seqpe.

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.

Dice Question Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Open Questions

We haven't generated a list of open questions mentioned in this paper yet.

Lightbulb Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Continue Learning

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

List To Do Tasks Checklist Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Github Logo Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
Youtube Logo Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com

Don't miss out on important new AI/ML research

See which papers are being discussed right now on X, Reddit, and more:

“Emergent Mind helps me see which AI papers have caught fire online.”

Philip

Philip

Creator, AI Explained on YouTube