# Self-Attention and Positional Encoding

I never understood why the original paper uses the following notation:

What exactly are the Q, K, V matrices? I have found in some articles “explaining” the paper that these three Q,K,V are actually the same input matrices. But then wouldn’t they just mention it as such in the original paper?

Suppose that the input representation X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d} contains the d-dimensional embeddings for n tokens of a sequence.

The output of a self-attention layer is still a matrix X' \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d'}. I see that the order is still maintained and is given by the row number in X and X'. Then why do we say that the word order is not preserved in self-attention?

I am surely missing something, so I need some help. Thanks!

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Hey @sprajagopal, great question! First just for clarification, Q,K and V don’t need to be the same. They might be the same in some specific model or specific task, we most of the time, at least the Q (query) is different to K (key) and V (value). For example, in BERT, query represents the bidirectional context, while key/value is the token itself.

I understand it is confusing at first, but after reading more original paper such as BERT, GPT3, you will get a more universal view on transformer and attention applications! Good luck!

Hi @Sebastian_Ciobanu, I may not fully understand your question, could you point out the specific example/location at the book? (Just a side note, transpose_qkv in 10.5 may help!)

## 10.6.3. Positional Encoding

Unlike RNNs that recurrently process tokens of a sequence one by one, self-attention ditches sequential operations in favor of parallel computation. To use the sequence order information, we can inject absolute or relative positional information by adding positional encoding to the input representations. Positional encodings can be either learned or fixed. In the following, we describe a fixed positional encoding based on sine and cosine functions [Vaswani et al., 2017].

Suppose that the input representation X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d} contains the d-dimensional embeddings for n tokens of a sequence.

I think that the authors suggest that self-attention does not take into consideration word order in a sequence. I also found this idea expressed on the Web:
Transformer Architecture: The Positional Encoding

As each word in a sentence simultaneously flows through the Transformer’s encoder/decoder stack, The model itself doesn’t have any sense of position/order for each word. Consequently, there’s still the need for a way to incorporate the order of the words into our model.

The problem is that I do not understand why self-attention does not take into consideration the word order, since its input sequence is X \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d} and the output sequence is X’ \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d’}, where the rows are ORDERED: the first row in X corresponds to the first row in X’, the second row in X corresponds to the second row in X’ etc., so the first row in X’ is the first word in the output sequence, the second row in X’ is the second row in the output sequence etc.

Hey @Sebastian_Ciobanu, I understand your question now! Yeah, if we just take a look of attention itself, we can somehow figure out the sequential information by counting. However, if we put attention in its application (e.g. put attention in the transformer architecture), attention doesn’t “send” sequential information to the next layer (e.g. in transformer, the “add&norm” layer will lose the sequential information).

The above reference you found are both trying to introduce “positional encoding”'s function, so don’t pay too much attention on them.