rotformer

Rotformer is a term with several uses; no single canonical definition. In engineering, it can refer to a rotary transformer, a device that transfers electrical energy or signals across a rotating interface using magnetic coupling between windings on stationary and rotating parts. Rotary transformers can provide galvanic isolation and avoid wear associated with slip rings. Designs vary from iron-core to air-core and may be used in aerospace, robotics, or machine tools where rotating subsystems must exchange power or data while maintaining a sealed or clean interface. Key considerations include alignment, coupling efficiency, frequency response, and thermal management.

In computing and machine learning, rotformer sometimes denotes a Transformer variant that employs rotary (rotational) position encoding. The most well-known approach, rotary position embeddings, rotates the query and key vectors by position-dependent angles, encoding relative positions directly in the attention computation. This family is often grouped under the name RoFormer or rotary transformers. Benefits cited include improved handling of long sequences, better generalization to longer inputs, and parameter-efficient incorporation of positional information without fixed absolute embeddings. Implementations may differ in rotation schemes and whether they modify only the attention mechanism or also the feed-forward blocks.

Despite the shared name, these uses are unrelated beyond rotation-related ideas. The term rotformer is not standardized and may appear in different contexts with varying specifications.