LayerRoPE introduces a depth‑wise magnitude and angular superposition mechanism that replaces per‑layer normalization gains with a single shared vector and depth‑conditioned scalars, reducing parameters and computational cost. Across 16 pre‑trained large language models and a 100B+ token model ladder, LayerRoPE outperforms traditional Pre‑, Post‑, and Peri‑Norm schemes, achieving comparable or better performance with significantly less compute and improved convergence up to 512 layers. The method demonstrates that widening the residual stream, rather than shrinking it, enhances depth stability and learning‑rate sensitivity, and it transfers effectively to latent and vision transformer architectures.
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.
We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization. We reinterpret skip connections and normalization, long understood as controlling magnitude, as mechanisms for preserving gradient rank across depth, since the very matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations that make the network expressive also reduce the rank.
arXiv:2607. 14018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization.
arXiv:2606. 26538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Transformers are composed of uniformly stacked residual blocks, yet their deepest layers often add little value.
The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.
arXiv:2607. 13380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically motivated alternative to backpropagation via local weight updates, yet routing error between layers still relies on an autograd Jacobian-transpose ($J^\top$) product - the last non-local operation in PC.
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.
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:2609.40127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keepin...
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.
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. 13298v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper presents a controlled comparative study of convolutional neural network (CNN) topology and image classification performance across the architectural families VGG, ResNet, and GoogLeNet, evaluated on CIFAR-10 under a unified training protocol.