# RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09864 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4,703 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Neural Ordinary Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07366/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02155/) (2018)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03122/) (2017)
- [Are Transformers universal approximators of sequence-to-sequence functions?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10077/) (2019)
- [Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01243/) (2018)
- [A Decomposable Attention Model for Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01933/) (2016)
- [Music Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04281/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Positional Encoding in Language Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15595/) (2020)
- [How Much Position Information Do Convolutional Neural Networks Encode?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08248/) (2020)
- [Training Tips for the Transformer Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00247/) (2018)
- [Improve Transformer Models with Better Relative Position Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13658/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 4703)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Qwen2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10671/) (2024)
- [Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00118/) (2024)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01373/) (2023)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12599/) (2025)
- [DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04434/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [BloombergGPT: A Large Language Model for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17564/) (2023)
- [MVDream: Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16512/) (2023)
- [Chameleon: Mixed-Modal Early-Fusion Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09818/) (2024)
- [Gemma: Open Models Based on Gemini Research and Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08295/) (2024)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Position encoding recently has shown effective in the transformer architecture. It enables valuable supervision for dependency modeling between elements at different positions of the sequence. In this paper, we first investigate various methods to integrate positional information into the learning process of transformer-based language models. Then, we propose a novel method named Rotary Position Embedding(RoPE) to effectively leverage the positional information. Specifically, the proposed RoPE encodes the absolute position with a rotation matrix and meanwhile incorporates the explicit relative position dependency in self-attention formulation. Notably, RoPE enables valuable properties, including the flexibility of sequence length, decaying inter-token dependency with increasing relative distances, and the capability of equipping the linear self-attention with relative position encoding. Finally, we evaluate the enhanced transformer with rotary position embedding, also called RoFormer, on various long text classification benchmark datasets. Our experiments show that it consistently overcomes its alternatives. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical analysis to explain some experimental results. RoFormer is already integrated into Huggingface: urlhttps://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/modeldoc/roformer.