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Beyond Real: Imaginary Extension of Rotary Position Embeddings for Long-Context LLMs
Liu, Xiaoran, Song, Yuerong, Liu, Zhigeng, Huang, Zengfeng, Guo, Qipeng, Liu, Zhaoxiang, Lian, Shiguo, He, Ziwei, Qiu, Xipeng
Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have become a standard for encoding sequence order in Large Language Models (LLMs) by applying rotations to query and key vectors in the complex plane. Standard implementations, however, utilize only the real component of the complex-valued dot product for attention score calculation. This simplification discards the imaginary component, which contains valuable phase information, leading to a potential loss of relational details crucial for modeling long-context dependencies. In this paper, we propose an extension that re-incorporates this discarded imaginary component. Our method leverages the full complex-valued representation to create a dual-component attention score. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that this approach enhances the modeling of long-context dependencies by preserving more positional information. Furthermore, evaluations on a suite of long-context language modeling benchmarks show that our method consistently improves performance over the standard RoPE, with the benefits becoming more significant as context length increases. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/rope_pp.
Benchmarking General-Purpose In-Context Learning
Wang, Fan, Lin, Chuan, Cao, Yang, Kang, Yu
In-context learning (ICL) empowers generative models to address new tasks effectively and efficiently on the fly, without relying on any artificially crafted optimization techniques. In this paper, we study extending ICL to address a broader range of tasks with an extended learning horizon and higher improvement potential, namely General-Purpose In-Context Learning (GPICL). To this end, we introduce two lightweight benchmarks specifically crafted to train and evaluate GPICL functionalities. Each benchmark encompasses a vast number of tasks characterized by significant task variance, facilitating meta-training that minimizes inductive bias. These tasks are also crafted to promote long-horizon in-context learning through continuous generation and interaction. These characteristics necessitate the models to leverage contexts and history interactions to enhance their capabilities, across domains such as language modeling, decision-making, and world modeling. Our experiments on the baseline models demonstrate that meta-training with minimal inductive bias and ICL from the ground up is feasible across all the domains we've discussed. Additionally, our findings indicate that the scale of parameters alone may not be crucial for ICL or GPICL, suggesting alternative approaches such as increasing the scale of contexts and memory states.