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Recently, DeepNorm scales Transformers into extremely deep (i.e., 1000 layers) and reveals the promising potential of deep scaling. To stabilize the training of deep models, DeepNorm (Wang et al., 2022) attempts to constrain the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-05 Yijin Liu , Xianfeng Zeng , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

Layer Normalization (LayerNorm) is an inherent component in all Transformer-based models. In this paper, we show that LayerNorm is crucial to the expressivity of the multi-head attention layer that follows it. This is in contrast to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Shaked Brody , Uri Alon , Eran Yahav

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…

Normalization layers in neural operators usually compute statistics by uniformly averaging discrete grid values, making the normalization itself discretization-dependent and thereby a source of transfer error across different resolutions or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Bum Jun Kim , Makoto Kawano , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo

Large language models (LLMs) have grown beyond the memory capacity of single GPU devices, necessitating quantization techniques for practical deployment. While NF4 (4-bit NormalFloat) quantization enables 4$\times$ memory reduction,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Xiangbo Qi , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Zhijian Zhuo , Yutao Zeng , Ya Wang , Sijun Zhang , Jian Yang , Xiaoqing Li , Xun Zhou , Jinwen Ma

Transformers have become foundational architectures for both natural language and computer vision tasks. However, the high computational cost makes it quite challenging to deploy on resource-constraint devices. This paper investigates the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Jialong Guo , Xinghao Chen , Yehui Tang , Yunhe Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Hongyu Wang , Shuming Ma , Li Dong , Shaohan Huang , Dongdong Zhang , Furu Wei

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Chao Wang , Bei Li , Jiaqi Zhang , Xinyu Liu , Yuchun Fan , Linkun Lyu , Xin Chen , Jingang Wang , Tong Xiao , Peng Pei , Xunliang Cai

Transformers, driven by attention mechanisms, form the foundation of large language models (LLMs). As these models scale up, efficient GPU attention kernels become essential for high-throughput and low-latency inference. Diverse LLM…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Zihao Ye , Lequn Chen , Ruihang Lai , Wuwei Lin , Yineng Zhang , Stephanie Wang , Tianqi Chen , Baris Kasikci , Vinod Grover , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Luis Ceze

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Rishi Singhal , Jung-Eun Kim

Normalization layer constitutes an essential component in neural networks. In transformers, the predominantly used RMSNorm constrains vectors to a unit hypersphere, followed by dimension-wise rescaling through a learnable scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Wenrui Cai , Defa Zhu , Qingjie Liu , Qiyang Min

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Qiming Yang , Kai Zhang , Chaoxiang Lan , Zhi Yang , Zheyang Li , Wenming Tan , Jun Xiao , Shiliang Pu

Normalization techniques are crucial for enhancing Transformer models' performance and stability in time series analysis tasks, yet traditional methods like batch and layer normalization often lead to issues such as token shift, attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Nan Huang , Christian Kümmerle , Xiang Zhang

Scaling Transformers to longer sequence lengths has been a major problem in the last several years, promising to improve performance in language modeling and high-resolution image understanding, as well as to unlock new applications in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Tri Dao

Trainings of Large Language Models are generally bottlenecked by matrix multiplications. In the Transformer architecture, a large portion of these operations happens in the Feed Forward Network (FFN), and this portion increases for larger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Meghana Madhyastha , Daniel Haziza , Jesse Cai , Newsha Ardalani , Zhiqi Bu , Carole-Jean Wu

Normalization layers and activation functions are fundamental components in deep networks and typically co-locate with each other. Here we propose to design them using an automated approach. Instead of designing them separately, we unify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-20 Hanxiao Liu , Andrew Brock , Karen Simonyan , Quoc V. Le

Transformers with linearised attention (''linear Transformers'') have demonstrated the practical scalability and effectiveness of outer product-based Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) from the '90s. However, the original FWP formulation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Kazuki Irie , Imanol Schlag , Róbert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Despite a big leap forward in capability, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) tend to behave like a sloth in practical use, i.e., slow response and large latency. Recent efforts are devoted to building tiny MLLMs for better efficiency,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Bo Tong , Bokai Lai , Yiyi Zhou , Gen Luo , Yunhang Shen , Ke Li , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji

The scaling of computation throughput continues to outpace improvements in memory bandwidth, making many deep learning workloads memory-bound. Kernel fusion is a key technique to alleviate this problem, but the fusion strategies of existing…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Ziyu Huang , Yangjie Zhou , Zihan Liu , Xinhao Luo , Yijia Diao , Minyi Guo , Jidong Zhai , Yu Feng , Chen Zhang , Anbang Wu , Jingwen Leng