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arXiv · 2610.39223

Where Position Matters: Profiling-Guided Layer-Wise RoPE Allocation in Transformers

Zhiwei Liu·Boao Kong·Bing Liu
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Abstract

Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) typically uses uniform coverage across Transformer layers despite heterogeneous positional requirements. Phase-off interventions reveal non-uniform, model-specific rotary-phase dependence, while coverage interventions relate it to coverage-upgrade benefits. We propose profiling-guided layer-wise RoPE allocation, assigning high/low coverage under a fixed budget using early coverage-benefit profiles. The framework supports fixed-width query/key representations and physical rotary-dimension allocation in Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). Normalized-depth mapping transfers profiles within model families, enabling small-model measurements to guide larger-model allocations before pretraining. A brief analysis relates selection and transfer to score calibration and inter-layer interactions. From-scratch experiments demonstrate validation-loss improvements over available budget-matched baselines, while analytical resource accounting identifies favorable quality--storage--compute trade-offs for physical MLA. These results connect positional demand to transferable, efficient architecture design.

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Zhiwei Liu, Boao Kong, Bing Liu. 2026-10-29. Where Position Matters: Profiling-Guided Layer-Wise RoPE Allocation in Transformers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39223

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