Related papers: You can remove GPT2's LayerNorm by fine-tuning

Layer-wise normalization (LN) is an essential component of virtually all transformer-based large language models. While its effects on training stability are well documented, its role at inference time is poorly understood. Additionally, LN…

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…

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…

LayerNorm is a critical component in modern large language models (LLMs) for stabilizing training and ensuring smooth optimization. However, it introduces significant challenges in mechanistic interpretability, outlier feature suppression,…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in performance, their size has escalated significantly, with current LLMs containing billions or even trillions of parameters. However, in this study, we discovered that many layers of…

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…

Fine-tuning a pre-trained model, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), has been proven to be an effective method for solving many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, due to the large number of…

Multiple studies have shown that Transformers are remarkably robust to pruning. Contrary to this received wisdom, we demonstrate that pre-trained Transformer encoders are surprisingly fragile to the removal of a very small number of…

Transformer-based large language models are a memory-bound model whose operation is based on a large amount of data that are marginally reused. Thus, the data movement between a host and accelerator likely dictates the total wall-clock…

Fine-tuning a pretrained transformer for a downstream task has become a standard method in NLP in the last few years. While the results from these models are impressive, applying them can be extremely computationally expensive, as is…

This paper reveals a novel linear characteristic exclusive to transformer decoders, including models such as GPT, LLaMA, OPT, BLOOM and others. We analyze embedding transformations between sequential layers, uncovering a near-perfect linear…

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…

The greatest ambition of mechanistic interpretability is to completely rewrite deep neural networks in a format that is more amenable to human understanding, while preserving their behavior and performance. In this paper, we attempt to…

Large language models (LLMs) are computationally intensive. The computation workload and the memory footprint grow quadratically with the dimension (layer width). Most of LLMs' parameters come from the linear layers of the transformer…

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…

Transformer-based pretrained models like BERT, GPT-2 and T5 have been finetuned for a large number of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, and have been shown to be very effective. However, while finetuning, what changes across layers…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. Understanding their internal mechanisms is crucial for developing more interpretable and optimized architectures. Mechanistic interpretability has led to the…

Large-scale transformer models have shown remarkable performance in language modelling tasks. However, such models feature billions of parameters, leading to difficulties in their deployment and prohibitive training costs from scratch. To…

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…

Large-scale, transformer-based language models such as GPT-2 are pretrained on diverse corpora scraped from the internet. Consequently, they are prone to generating non-normative text (i.e. in violation of social norms). We introduce a…