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Home/Glossary/Positional Encoding
AI Glossary Term

What does “Positional Encoding” mean?

Definition

Information added to token embeddings so transformers can distinguish sequence order.

Related terms

RoPE (Rotary Positional Embeddings)
A positional encoding method that rotates query and key vectors to encode relative token positions.
ALiBi
A positional bias method that penalizes attention scores based on token distance, helping models extrapolate to longer contexts.
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT)
Methods that adapt models by training a small subset of added parameters.
AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)
A hypothetical AI system that can perform most intellectual tasks at a human level across many domains.
AI Agent
A software system that can observe, reason, and take actions to achieve a goal, often using tools and memory.
Annotation
Human-added labels or metadata used to train or evaluate machine learning models.

Learn more in our free guides

Positional Interpolation for Long ContextInstant-NGP Hash EncodingByte-Pair EncodingTokenization and Byte Pair Encoding

See also

Multi-Head AttentionFlash AttentionQLoRASliding Window AttentionDPO (Direct Preference Optimization)BPE (Byte Pair Encoding)Tree of ThoughtsSentencePiece
PreviousMulti-Head AttentionNextRoPE (Rotary Positional Embeddings)
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