arXiv AI
Aug 10
Stability of Transformers under Layer Normalization
arXiv:2510. 09904v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite their widespread use, training deep Transformers can be unstable.
Looped Transformers with Layer Normalization Provably Learn the Power Method
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.
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arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5
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 AI
Jul 20
In-context learning of closed form solution to simple linear regression task using transformer with linear self-attention
arXiv:2607. 15819v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In-context learning is a remarkable property of transformers and has recently received a lot of interest.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2
Performance-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Transformers: An Approximation Theory Perspective
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 Machine Learning
Jul 14
AutoNorm: Understanding Adaptive Normalization in Transformers through Differentiable Gating
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.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30
Generalization Analysis of Transformers in Distribution Regression
arXiv:2606. 29256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, models based on the Transformer architecture have seen widespread applications and have become one of the core tools in the field of deep learning.
arXiv AI
Jun 11
Unifying Learning Dynamics and Generalization in Transformers Scaling Law
arXiv:2512. 22088v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The scaling law, a cornerstone of Large Language Model (LLM) development, predicts improvements in model performance with increasing computational resources.
arXiv AI
Aug 19
Gradient Heterogeneity Complements Hessian Heterogeneity in Transformer Optimization
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 Machine Learning
Jun 30
A Mechanistic Study of Transformers Training Dynamics
arXiv:2410. 24050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale pretraining of transformers has been central to the success of foundation models.
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10
Conditioned Initialization for Attention
arXiv:2609.07086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers are a dominant architecture in modern machine learning, powering applications across vision, language, and beyond. At the core of their su...
arXiv AI
Jul 7
Individual Parameters in Weight-Sparse Transformers Appear Interpretable
arXiv:2607. 02964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16
LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers
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.