Related papers: SpanNorm: Reconciling Training Stability and Perfo…
A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name "Transformers", the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm…
Training large language models (LLMs) typically involves pre-training on massive corpora, only to restart the process entirely when new data becomes available. A more efficient and resource-conserving approach would be continual…
The ever increasing sizes of Large Language Models (LLMs) beyond hundreds of billions of parameters have generated enormous pressure on the manufacturers of dedicated hardware accelerators and made the innovative design of the latter one of…
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…
Many deep learning applications benefit from using large models with billions of parameters. Training these models is notoriously expensive due to the need for specialized HPC clusters. In this work, we consider alternative setups for…
Deep multitask networks, in which one neural network produces multiple predictive outputs, can offer better speed and performance than their single-task counterparts but are challenging to train properly. We present a gradient normalization…
Foundation models have achieved remarkable success across diverse machine-learning domains through large-scale pretraining on large, diverse datasets. However, pretraining on such datasets introduces significant challenges due to…
Inspired by BatchNorm, there has been an explosion of normalization layers in deep learning. Recent works have identified a multitude of beneficial properties in BatchNorm to explain its success. However, given the pursuit of alternative…
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…
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…
The rapid advancements in deep learning necessitate better training methods for deep neural networks (DNNs). As models grow in complexity, vanishing and exploding gradients impede performance, particularly in skip-connected architectures…
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…
This paper studies the impact of layer normalization (LayerNorm) on zero-shot translation (ZST). Recent efforts for ZST often utilize the Transformer architecture as the backbone, with LayerNorm at the input of layers (PreNorm) set as the…
Despite their impressive performance, contemporary neural networks often lack structural safeguards that promote stable learning and interpretable behavior. In this work, we introduce a reformulation of layer-level transformations that…
This paper introduces an efficient strategy to transform Large Language Models (LLMs) into Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). By conceptualizing this transformation as a domain adaptation process, i.e., transitioning from text…
Batch Normalization (BatchNorm) is a widely adopted technique that enables faster and more stable training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Despite its pervasiveness, the exact reasons for BatchNorm's effectiveness are still poorly…
Protein language models (pLMs) pre-trained on vast protein sequence databases excel at various downstream tasks but often lack the structural knowledge essential for some biological applications. To address this, we introduce a method to…
Distribution shift poses a significant challenge in machine learning, particularly in biomedical applications using data collected across different subjects, institutions, and recording devices, such as sleep data. While existing…
Large language models (LLMs) are routinely pre-trained on billions of tokens, only to start the process over again once new data becomes available. A much more efficient solution is to continually pre-train these models, saving significant…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) laid the foundation for sequence modeling, but their intrinsic sequential nature restricts parallel computation, creating a fundamental barrier to scaling. This has led to the dominance of parallelizable…