As we always use Transformers, it's helpful to understand RoPE—Rotary Position Embedding. Since token order matters, RoPE encodes it by rotating token embeddings based on their position, so the model knows how to interpret which token comes first, second, and so on.
Here are 8 types of RoPE that can be implemented in different cases:
4. Multimodal RoPE (MRoPE) -> Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report (2502.13923) Decomposes positional embedding into 3 components: temporal, height and width, so that positional features are aligned across modalities: text, images and videos.
8. XPos (Extrapolatable Position Embedding) -> https://huggingface.co/papers/2212.10 Introduces an exponential decay factor into the rotation matrix, improving stability on long sequences.
An assembly of 18 European companies, labs, and universities have banded together to launch 🇪🇺 EuroBERT! It's a state-of-the-art multilingual encoder for 15 European languages, designed to be finetuned for retrieval, classification, etc.
🇪🇺 15 Languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Dutch, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi 3️⃣ 3 model sizes: 210M, 610M, and 2.1B parameters - very very useful sizes in my opinion ➡️ Sequence length of 8192 tokens! Nice to see these higher sequence lengths for encoders becoming more common. ⚙️ Architecture based on Llama, but with bi-directional (non-causal) attention to turn it into an encoder. Flash Attention 2 is supported. 🔥 A new Pareto frontier (stronger *and* smaller) for multilingual encoder models 📊 Evaluated against mDeBERTa, mGTE, XLM-RoBERTa for Retrieval, Classification, and Regression (after finetuning for each task separately): EuroBERT punches way above its weight. 📝 Detailed paper with all details, incl. data: FineWeb for English and CulturaX for multilingual data, The Stack v2 and Proof-Pile-2 for code.
The next step is for researchers to build upon the 3 EuroBERT base models and publish strong retrieval, zero-shot classification, etc. models for all to use. I'm very much looking forward to it!