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Anti-Periodic Positional Encoding: Möbius Boundary Conditions Make In-Context Retrieval Reliable

Research LLMs & Foundation Models

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TL;DR - Möbius RoPE introduces anti-periodic positional encoding that substantially improves the reliability of in-context retrieval without degrading perplexity. It offers a zero-cost architectural change for reducing retrieval failures within the training context window.

  • Uses an odd-frequency ladder that couples sequence endpoints through an anti-periodic boundary condition.
  • At 160M scale, hybrid Möbius RoPE achieved 90.3% needle retrieval versus 63.3% for standard RoPE, with much lower seed variance.
  • Results recurred at 410M scale; matched controls and frozen-weight frequency swaps support long-range geometry as the mechanism.
  • Benefits are limited to single-needle retrieval within the training window; NoPE performed better at short context but incurred a 13% perplexity penalty and extrapolated poorly.

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Anti-Periodic Positional Encoding: Möbius Boundary Conditions Make In-Context Retrieval Reliable

arXiv cs.CL Ji Ho Bae 2026-07-23 arXiv:2607.21405
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-14 14:28:00.185657 UTC

TL;DR - Möbius RoPE introduces anti-periodic positional encoding that substantially improves the reliability of in-context retrieval without degrading perplexity. It offers a zero-cost architectural change for reducing retrieval failures within the training context window.

  • Uses an odd-frequency ladder that couples sequence endpoints through an anti-periodic boundary condition.
  • At 160M scale, hybrid Möbius RoPE achieved 90.3% needle retrieval versus 63.3% for standard RoPE, with much lower seed variance.
  • Results recurred at 410M scale; matched controls and frozen-weight frequency swaps support long-range geometry as the mechanism.
  • Benefits are limited to single-needle retrieval within the training window; NoPE performed better at short context but incurred a 13% perplexity penalty and extrapolated poorly.
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