Related papers: On Layer Normalization in the Transformer Architec…
Selecting a layer normalization (LN) strategy that stabilizes training and speeds convergence in Transformers remains difficult, even for today's large language models (LLM). We present a comprehensive analytical foundation for…
Despite their widespread use, training deep Transformers can be unstable. Layer normalization, a standard component, improves training stability, but its placement has often been ad-hoc. In this paper, we conduct a principled study on the…
Learning rate warm-up - increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training - has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we provide a principled…
Layer Normalization (LayerNorm) is one of the fundamental components in transformers that stabilizes training and improves optimization. In recent times, Pre-LayerNorm transformers have become the preferred choice over Post-LayerNorm…
The increasing scale of Transformer models has led to an increase in their pre-training computational requirements. While quantization has proven to be effective after pre-training and during fine-tuning, applying quantization in…
Conventional fine-tuning encounters increasing difficulties given the size of current Pre-trained Language Models, which makes parameter-efficient tuning become the focal point of frontier research. Previous methods in this field add…
Self-supervised pre-training of large-scale transformer models on text corpora followed by finetuning has achieved state-of-the-art on a number of natural language processing tasks. Recently, Lu et al. (2021, arXiv:2103.05247) claimed that…
Though the transformer architectures have shown dominance in many natural language understanding tasks, there are still unsolved issues for the training of transformer models, especially the need for a principled way of warm-up which has…
From the perspective of the layer normalization (LN) positions, the architectures of Transformers can be categorized into two types: Post-LN and Pre-LN. Recent Transformers tend to be Pre-LN because, in Post-LN with deep Transformers (e.g.,…
Parameter fine tuning is a transfer learning approach whereby learned parameters from pre-trained source network are transferred to the target network followed by fine-tuning. Prior research has shown that this approach is capable of…
This study investigates the layerwise importance of feed-forward networks (FFNs) in Transformer-based language models during pretraining. We introduce an experimental approach that, while maintaining the total parameter count, increases the…
Normalization layers were introduced to stabilize and accelerate training, yet their influence is critical already at initialization, where they shape signal propagation and output statistics before parameters adapt to data. In practice,…
Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the layers of a…
Recently, Transformer-based language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across many NLP domains. However, the unsupervised pre-training step of these models suffers from unbearable overall computational expenses. Current…
Transformer architectures serve as the backbone for most modern Large Language Models, therefore their pretraining stability and convergence speed are of central concern. Motivated by the logical dependency of sequentially stacked layers,…
Normalization and scaling are fundamental preprocessing steps in time series modeling, yet their role in Transformer-based models remains underexplored from a theoretical perspective. In this work, we present the first formal analysis of…
Learning Rate Warmup is a popular heuristic for training neural networks, especially at larger batch sizes, despite limited understanding of its benefits. Warmup decreases the update size $\Delta \mathbf{w}_t = \eta_t \mathbf{u}_t$ early in…
Normalization layers are a staple in state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures. They are widely believed to stabilize training, enable higher learning rate, accelerate convergence and improve generalization, though the reason for…
Transformers have achieved great success in machine learning applications. Normalization techniques, such as Layer Normalization (LayerNorm, LN) and Root Mean Square Normalization (RMSNorm), play a critical role in accelerating and…
The Transformer translation model employs residual connection and layer normalization to ease the optimization difficulties caused by its multi-layer encoder/decoder structure. Previous research shows that even with residual connection and…