arXiv:2608.10021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-attention models content-dependent interactions between tokens but does not by itself encode token order. Position encoding addresses this limitation by introducing absolute coordinates, relative distances, or position-dependent rotations into Transformer representations and attention scores. This technical survey develops a unified account of sinusoidal and learned absolute position embeddings, Shaw-style relative position representations, Transformer-XL, T5 relative position bias, ALiBi, and Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE). We derive how
A positioning-methods overview aids long-context scaling choices, helping architects pick embeddings that preserve retrieval and reasoning over long documents efficiently.
Published to Cognify News · Week 33, 2026