Consider the calculation of an attention weight, which determines the influence of an input at position j on the output at a later position i. The calculation is based on a formula that includes: 1) a similarity score between vectors from positions i and j, 2) a term that depends on the relative distance between i and j, and 3) a masking component that prevents attending to positions k where k > i. If the term that depends on the relative distance were removed from this calculation, what would be the primary consequence?

Calculating Pre-Normalized Attention Scores

In a causal attention mechanism that incorporates relative positional information, consider the calculation of attention for an output at position i. If the dot product of the query vector from position i with the key vector from position j is identical to its dot product with the key vector from position k (where j ≠ k, and both j, k < i), then the final attention weights assigned to positions j and k will also be identical.