arXiv AI

Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

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.

By Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Do Value Vectors in Deep Layers Need Context from the Residual Stream?

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.

By Muyu He, Yuchen Liu, Qingya Huang, Li Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

From Deep to Shallow: Unconstrained and Efficient Layer Merging Strategy

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.

By Petro Shulzhenko, Gabriele Spadaro, Enzo Tartaglione
arXiv AI
Jul 16

DeepLoop: Depth Scaling for Looped Transformers

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.

By Shuzhen Li, Yifan Zhang, Jiacheng Guo, Quanquan Gu, Mengdi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Beyond Depth Truncation: Controlled Evaluation of Depth Utilization in Recursive Language Models

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.

By Ha Van Dau, Thanh Tung Khuat, Nguyen Thanh Dung