Scaling depth capacity via zero/one-layer model expansion
arXiv:2511. 04981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model depth is a double-edged sword in deep learning: deeper models achieve higher accuracy but require higher computational cost.
arXiv:2606. 16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth.
arXiv:2511. 04981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model depth is a double-edged sword in deep learning: deeper models achieve higher accuracy but require higher computational cost.
arXiv:2602. 07494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deeper modern architectures are costly to train, making hyperparameter transfer preferable to expensive repeated tuning.
arXiv:2606. 30813v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks with repeated architectural blocks, such as transformers, often exhibit structured relationships across layers that emerge during training.
arXiv:2606. 26538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Transformers are composed of uniformly stacked residual blocks, yet their deepest layers often add little value.
arXiv:2608. 14664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How can we determine whether a trained neural network is already deep enough?
arXiv:2608. 15062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency.
The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.
The paper investigates whether deep transformer layers require context from the residual stream to compute value vectors. It finds that allowing deeper layers to use a context‑free value vector—preserving original token information—significantly improves performance, and adding context afterward yields little extra benefit. The authors introduce Bank of Values (BoV), a lookup table of token‑specific value vectors for the last third of layers, which reduces compute and memory while matching or surpassing prior methods on large models.
arXiv:2608.15062v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency. While unique weights across layer...
The paper proposes a new strategy for merging layers in deep neural networks, enabling depth compression without requiring an analytical solution for convolutions with padding and without increasing kernel size. This approach addresses limitations of previous methods that struggled with padded convolutions and larger kernels, and it is validated across various architectures and datasets with measured inference speed-ups on embedded platforms.
arXiv:2607. 13491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Looped Transformers scale sequential computation by applying a compact stack of physical blocks for multiple rounds, increasing unrolled depth without increasing stored parameters.
The paper critiques the common practice of evaluating depth usage in depth‑recurrent language models by truncating depth during inference and measuring performance decline. It argues that this method conflates three distinct effects—fewer block applications, reduced computation, and an out‑of‑distribution readout—yet is usually interpreted as measuring only the second. To address this, the authors introduce the Depth Control Protocol (DCP), a suite of positive and negative controls that isolate each factor, along with a training intervention to confirm causality, specifically tailored for depth‑wise weight‑sharing architectures.