What is a positional encoding?
A technique to add information about the position of a token in a sequence to the token's embedding.
positional encoding explained in plain English
A technique to add information about the position of a token in a sequence to the token's embedding. Transformer models use positional encoding to better understand the relationship between different parts of the sequence. A common implementation of positional encoding uses a sinusoidal function. (Specifically, the frequency and amplitude of the sinusoidal function are determined by the position of the token in the sequence.) This technique enables a Transformer model to learn to attend to different parts of the sequence based on their position.
Example
Practitioners refer to positional encoding when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.
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