Related papers: Exploring the Impact of Layer Normalization for Ze…

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…

Layer normalization (LayerNorm) is a technique to normalize the distributions of intermediate layers. It enables smoother gradients, faster training, and better generalization accuracy. However, it is still unclear where the effectiveness…

LayerNorm is pivotal in Vision Transformers (ViTs), yet its fine-tuning dynamics under data scarcity and domain shifts remain underexplored. This paper shows that shifts in LayerNorm parameters after fine-tuning (LayerNorm shifts) are…

We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large…

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…

Normalization techniques have proved to be a crucial ingredient of successful training in a traditional supervised learning regime. However, in the zero-shot learning (ZSL) world, these ideas have received only marginal attention. This work…

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures. A critical design choice is the placement of normalization layers, leading to a fundamental trade-off: the ``PreNorm'' architecture…

The placement of normalization layers, specifically Pre-Norm and Post-Norm, remains an open question in Transformer architecture design. In this work, we rethink these approaches through the lens of manifold optimization, interpreting the…

This work analyzes the training dynamics of Image Restoration (IR) Transformers and uncovers a critical yet overlooked issue: conventional LayerNorm (LN) drives feature magnitudes to diverge to a million scale and collapses channel-wise…

Oversmoothing is a common phenomenon in a wide range of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers, where performance worsens as the number of layers increases. Instead of characterizing oversmoothing from the view of complete collapse…

In deep learning, Residual Networks (ResNets) have proven effective in addressing the vanishing gradient problem, allowing for the successful training of very deep networks. However, skip connections in ResNets can lead to gradient overlap,…

In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to stabilize extremely deep Transformers. Specifically, we introduce a new normalization function (DeepNorm) to modify the residual connection in Transformer, accompanying with…

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,…

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…

Transfer learning between different language pairs has shown its effectiveness for Neural Machine Translation (NMT) in low-resource scenario. However, existing transfer methods involving a common target language are far from success in the…

During pretraining, the Pre-LayerNorm transformer suffers from a gradient magnitude mismatch: gradients at early layers are much larger than at later layers. These issues can be alleviated by our proposed NormFormer architecture, which adds…

Recent works have shown that transformers can solve contextual reasoning tasks by internally executing computational graphs called circuits. Circuits often use attention to logically match information from subspaces of the representation,…

The multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) model has a promising capability of zero-shot translation, where it could directly translate between language pairs unseen during training. For good transfer performance from supervised…

Zero-shot translation, directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, is a promising capability of multilingual neural machine translation (NMT). However, it usually suffers from capturing spurious correlations between the…

We study the generalization behavior of transfer learning of deep neural networks (DNNs). We adopt the overparameterization perspective -- featuring interpolation of the training data (i.e., approximately zero train error) and the double…