Related papers: Pre-RMSNorm and Pre-CRMSNorm Transformers: Equival…

Layer normalization (LN) is a fundamental component in modern deep learning, but its per-sample centering and scaling introduce non-negligible inference overhead. RMSNorm improves efficiency by removing the centering operation, yet this may…

Layer normalization (LayerNorm) has been successfully applied to various deep neural networks to help stabilize training and boost model convergence because of its capability in handling re-centering and re-scaling of both inputs and weight…

Normalization layers are ubiquitous in large language models (LLMs) yet represent a compute bottleneck: on hardware with distinct vector and matrix execution units, the RMS calculation blocks the subsequent matrix multiplication, preventing…

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…

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…

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…

Transformers have become the de facto architecture for a wide range of machine learning tasks, particularly in large language models (LLMs). Despite their remarkable performance, many challenges remain in training deep transformer networks,…

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…

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…

Solid results from Transformers have made them prevailing architectures in various natural language and vision tasks. As a default component in Transformers, Layer Normalization (LN) normalizes activations within each token to boost the…

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 rapid development of the Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years has been closely linked to their ever-growing and already enormous sizes. Many LLMs contain hundreds of billions of parameters and require dedicated…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet recent findings reveal that their deeper layers often contribute minimally and can be pruned without affecting overall performance. While some view this as an opportunity…

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural-language processing, yet their scale makes real-world deployment costly. Post-training quantization reduces memory and computation but often degrades accuracy, while quantization-aware…

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…

Matrix multiplication performance has long been the major bottleneck to scaling deep learning workloads, which has stimulated the design of new accelerators that use increasingly low-precision number formats. However, improvements in matrix…

LayerNorm and RMSNorm impose fundamentally different geometric constraints on their outputs - and this difference has a precise, quantifiable consequence for model complexity. We prove that LayerNorm's mean-centering step, by confining data…

State-of-the-art rehearsal-free continual learning methods exploit the peculiarities of Vision Transformers to learn task-specific prompts, drastically reducing catastrophic forgetting. However, there is a tradeoff between the number of…

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…

The standard normalization method for neural network (NN) models used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is layer normalization (LN). This is different than batch normalization (BN), which is widely-adopted in Computer Vision. The…