unrolled

Unrolled is the past participle of the verb unroll. It describes something that has been straightened, unfurled, or laid out from a rolled or coiled state. The term can be used literally for objects that have been unrolled, such as parchment, posters, carpets, cables, or maps, which are often stored rolled and then opened for use. It can also describe processes or states in a figurative sense, such as events that unfold or are disclosed gradually.

In physical production and storage, items are often produced or sold in rolled form for space efficiency, then unrolled for examination, cutting, or installation. Describing a sheet of material, such as paper or fabric, as unrolled conveys its current state as flat and ready to be measured or cut.

In computing and mathematics, unrolling appears in several technical senses. Loop unrolling is a compiler optimization that expands the body of a loop to perform multiple iterations per cycle, reducing branch overhead and potentially increasing instruction-level parallelism; it trades code size for speed. In machine learning and algorithm design, the term unrolled is used to describe models or computations expanded over time steps or iterations, such as unrolled recurrent networks or unrolled optimization procedures, where a sequence of steps is laid out explicitly for training or analysis.

See also: unroll.