nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding
About
Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformer models, yet its extension to high-dimensional domains lacks a unified theoretical formulation. Most existing approaches either apply rotations independently along each axis or empirically mix frequencies, which limits cross-dimensional interactions and yields direction-dependent representations. To address these limitations, we propose nD-RoPE, a decomposition-free generalization of RoPE to arbitrary dimensions. From a translation-invariant formulation in continuous Hilbert space, we derive a spectral condition for isotropy that requires treating positions and frequencies as coupled \(n\)-dimensional vectors. We instantiate this formulation with a multi-scale regular-simplex wave-vector design, which provides non-degenerate spatial coverage and a symmetric, directionally balanced second-order response. Experiments across images, videos, and point clouds demonstrate consistent performance gains and improved generalization in high-dimensional settings.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | ImageNet-1k (val) | Top-1 Accuracy82.15 | 871 | |
| Video Recognition | Kinetics 400 (test) | -- | 54 | |
| Point Cloud Part Segmentation | ModelNet40 | mIoU (instance-average)85.97 | 49 | |
| Point Cloud Segmentation | SemanticKITTI v2 (test) | Instance-Average mIoU73.14 | 49 |