Answer: To provide sequence order information to the model

Transformers use positional encodings to provide sequence order information to the model. Unlike recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that process sequences sequentially and inherently capture order, Transformers process all tokens in parallel using self-attention mechanisms. This parallel processing makes them more efficient but loses the inherent sequence order information. Positional encodings are added to the input embeddings to inject information about the relative or absolute position of tokens in the sequence, allowing the model to understand the order of elements in the input sequence.

Author: Ritesh Yadav