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Equation 11 · Part 7 · How Llama's Architecture Actually Works, Generation by Generation

subtraction

⟨RΘ,m q,  RΘ,n k⟩  =  ⟨RΘ, m−n q,  k⟩.\langle R_{\Theta,m}\,q,\; R_{\Theta,n}\,k\rangle \;=\; \langle R_{\Theta,\,m-n}\,q,\; k\rangle.
subtraction

What this part means

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

Its job in the formula

Subtract the following term or group from the preceding one. A leading minus marks a negative quantity.

The passage around this formula

The property that makes this useful rather than merely elegant is that rotating a query at position m and a key at position n by these matrices before taking their dot product leaves a result that depends only on the distance between them: ⟨RΘ,m q,  RΘ,n k⟩  =  ⟨RΘ, m−n q,  k⟩\langle R_{\Theta,m}\,q,\; R_{\Theta,n}\,k\rangle \;=\; \langle R_{\Theta,\,m-n}\,q,\; k\rangle. Relative position falls out of the mechanism instead of being engineered into it separately, and — as the RoFormer paper’s own experiments emphasise — the same rotation formula applies at any sequence length the rotation frequencies were designed for, which is what makes RoPE the natural place to intervene when a later generation wants a longer context window [ 5 ] .

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Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.