Understanding Positional Encodings: Absolute, Relative, and Rotary

Positional encodings are a crucial component of transformer models, enabling them to understand the order of tokens in a sequence. Since transformers lack built-in mechanisms to process sequential data, positional encodings inject information about the position of each token, allowing the model to capture the structure of the input. In this blog post, we’ll explore three popular types of positional encodings: **Absolute Positional Encoding**, **Relative Positional Encoding**, and **Rotary Positional Encoding**. We’ll also discuss their differences, sample outputs, and why they matter.