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Related papers: Do Language Models Use Their Depth Efficiently?

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Large Language Models are growing in size, and we expect them to continue to do so, as larger models train quicker. However, this increase in size will severely impact inference costs. Therefore model compression is important, to retain the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Georgy Tyukin

The remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are overshadowed by their immense computational cost. While recent work has shown that many LLM layers can be reordered or even removed with minimal impact on accuracy, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Ramón Calvo González , Daniele Paliotta , Matteo Pagliardini , Martin Jaggi , François Fleuret

Large language model (LLM) architectures are often described as functionally hierarchical: Early layers process syntax, middle layers begin to parse semantics, and late layers integrate information. The present work revisits these ideas.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Paul C. Bogdan

LLM architecture research generally aims to maximize model quality subject to fixed compute/latency budgets. However, many applications of interest such as edge and on-device deployment are further constrained by the model's memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Abbas Zeitoun , Lucas Torroba-Hennigen , Yoon Kim

The inference demand for LLMs has skyrocketed in recent months, and serving models with low latencies remains challenging due to the quadratic input length complexity of the attention layers. In this work, we investigate the effect of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Georgy Tyukin , Gbetondji J-S Dovonon , Jean Kaddour , Pasquale Minervini

Large language models are remarkably capable, yet how computation propagates through their layers remains poorly understood. A growing line of work treats depth as discrete time and the residual stream as a dynamical system, where each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Jesseba Fernando , Grigori Guitchounts

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess outstanding capabilities in addressing various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the sheer size of these models poses challenges in terms of storage, training and inference due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Shuzhou Yuan , Ercong Nie , Bolei Ma , Michael Färber

Neural scaling laws describe how language model loss decreases with parameters and data, but treat architecture as interchangeable--a billion parameters could arise from a shallow-wide model (10 layers & 8,192 hidden dimension) or a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Md Muhtasim Munif Fahim , Md Rezaul Karim

Transformers deliver outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks and are now a dominant backbone architecture for large language models (LLMs). Their task-solving performance is improved by increasing parameter size, as shown in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Hidetaka Kamigaito , Ying Zhang , Jingun Kwon , Katsuhiko Hayashi , Manabu Okumura , Taro Watanabe

Transformer-based Large Language Models, which suffer from high computational costs, advance so quickly that techniques proposed to streamline earlier iterations are not guaranteed to benefit more modern models. Building upon the Funnel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-07 DongHyun Choi , Lucas Spangher , Chris Hidey , Peter Grabowski , Ramy Eskander

Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Lianghui Zhu , Yuxin Fang , Bencheng Liao , Shijie Wang , Tianheng Cheng , Zilong Huang , Chen Chen , Lai Wei , Yutao Zeng , Ya Wang , Yi Lin , Yu Li , Xinggang Wang

From extracting features to generating text, the outputs of large language models (LLMs) typically rely on the final layers, following the conventional wisdom that earlier layers capture only low-level cues. However, our analysis shows that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Oscar Skean , Md Rifat Arefin , Dan Zhao , Niket Patel , Jalal Naghiyev , Yann LeCun , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv

Multilingualism in Large Language Models (LLMs) is an yet under-explored area. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the multilingual capabilities of a family of a Large Language Model, examining its architecture, activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Sunit Bhattacharya , Ondřej Bojar

Large language models (LLMs) have been a disruptive innovation in recent years, and they play a crucial role in our daily lives due to their ability to understand and generate human-like text. Their capabilities include natural language…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Akrit Mudvari , Yuang Jiang , Leandros Tassiulas

We investigate the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs) to structural interventions by deleting and swapping adjacent layers during inference. Surprisingly, models retain 72-95% of their original top-1 prediction accuracy without any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Vedang Lad , Jin Hwa Lee , Wes Gurnee , Max Tegmark

Large Language Models (LLMs) have delivered impressive results in language understanding, generation, reasoning, and pushes the ability boundary of multimodal models. Transformer models, as the foundation of modern LLMs, offer a strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Weigao Sun , Jiaxi Hu , Yucheng Zhou , Jusen Du , Disen Lan , Kexin Wang , Tong Zhu , Xiaoye Qu , Yu Zhang , Xiaoyu Mo , Daizong Liu , Yuxuan Liang , Wenliang Chen , Guoqi Li , Yu Cheng

In this paper, we introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that highlights, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models (LLMs) where nearly half of the layers are less effective than expected. We first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Wenfang Sun , Xinyuan Song , Pengxiang Li , Lu Yin , Yefeng Zheng , Shiwei Liu

Large number of ReLU and MAC operations of Deep neural networks make them ill-suited for latency and compute-efficient private inference. In this paper, we present a model optimization method that allows a model to learn to be shallow. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Souvik Kundu , Yuke Zhang , Dake Chen , Peter A. Beerel

Compute scaling for LLM reasoning requires allocating budget between exploring solution approaches ($breadth$) and refining promising solutions ($depth$). Most methods implicitly trade off one for the other, yet why a given trade-off works…

Large language models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention due to their prominent ability to understand and process texts. Nevertheless, LLMs largely remain opaque. The lack of understanding of LLMs has obstructed the deployment in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Yang Zhang , Yanfei Dong , Kenji Kawaguchi