Transformer

Attention with Linear Biases (ALiBi): How Static Positional Slopes Enable Zero-Shot Context Extrapolation

Large language models process sequences by transforming discrete tokens into continuous vector representations. Standard dot-product self-attention is permutation-invariant: without explicit positional information, the attention operation treats a sequence as an unordered bag of tokens. Early transformer architectures addressed this limitation using Absolute Positional Embeddings (APE), either through fixed sinusoidal functions or learned lookup tables added directly to token embeddings. While