SpanNorm: Reconciling Training Stability and Performance in Deep Transformers
arXiv:2601. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures.
arXiv:2510. 09904v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite their widespread use, training deep Transformers can be unstable.
arXiv:2601. 22580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) hinges on the stable training of deep Transformer architectures.
arXiv:2606. 00605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, and a growing body of work suggests that part of their strength comes from their ability to learn and execute algorithmic procedures.
arXiv:2607. 10593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Normalization is a critical component for stabilizing Transformer training, yet the choice between static strategies such as Layer Normalization (LN) and adaptive alternatives remains largely task-dependent.
The paper investigates why adaptive optimizers like Adam outperform SGD when fine‑tuning Transformers. It introduces gradient heterogeneity—the variation in gradient norms across parameter blocks—and shows, both theoretically and experimentally, that this heterogeneity, together with Hessian heterogeneity, hampers SGD convergence while sign‑based methods such as SignSGD are less affected. The study links the source of gradient heterogeneity to layer‑normalization placement, finding that Post‑LN architectures exhibit the strongest effect, and uses SignSGD as a tractable proxy to analyze Adam‑like behavior and learning‑rate scaling.
arXiv:2410. 24050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale pretraining of transformers has been central to the success of foundation models.
arXiv:2602. 06883v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The smoothness of the transformer architecture has been extensively studied in the context of generalization, training stability, and adversarial robustness.
arXiv:2606. 18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters.
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:2609.15975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer representations evolve through learned additive transformations that either preserve their current direction or redirect it. We study thi...
The paper examines how to allocate attention heads and head dimensions across Transformer layers to balance expressivity and efficiency. It provides a mathematical analysis of early layers’ role in information extraction and characterizes the trade‑off between head count and dimension under a fixed parameter budget. The authors prove a saturation effect of softmax activations, showing that increasing head dimensions yields diminishing returns, especially for long sequences, and propose strategies for efficient parameter allocation across layers.
arXiv:2606. 31859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Residual connections add every sublayer's proposed update with a fixed coefficient of one; the network never evaluates whether an update is reliable before committing it.
arXiv:2606. 16243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting.