arxivcs.LG2026-07-08
How Data Shapes RoPE Frequency Usage: From Positional Scale Matching to Length Generalization
Xinyi Wu, Siyuan Liu, Ali Jadbabaie
Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) provide transformers with a fixed grid of positional frequencies, yet trained models use these frequencies highly non-uniformly. We study what determines this frequency usage and propose a data-centered explanation: RoPE frequencies are selected…