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Deep Learning with C++
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One of the fundamental challenges in transformer architecture is the absence of inherent sequential information. Unlike RNNs and LSTM networks, which process tokens sequentially and naturally encode position through their recurrent structure, the self-attention mechanism in transformers allows all tokens to interact directly and simultaneously with each other. This parallelization, while computationally advantageous, creates a critical problem: without additional information, the transformer is position-agnostic and cannot distinguish the order of tokens in a sequence.
Consider the sentences “The cat chased the mouse” and “The mouse chased the cat.” Without positional information, both sentences are identical “set” of tokens for the model. Positional encoding solves this problem by injecting position-dependent information into the model, enabling it to understand and leverage word order. There are a few variants of...