A Mesoscopic View of Transformer Weights Through Row and Column Scale Fields
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2606. 19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on a two-parameter Weibull framework for diagnosing transformer weight distributions, we study why the Weibull weight-scale parameter $\lambda$ grows, overshoots, and then relaxes during AdamW training.
arXiv:2610.00423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Massive activations, residual-stream coordinates with magnitudes far larger than typical activations, are associated with attention sinks in transfor...
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:2608. 12447v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trained transformer models develop privileged bases: coordinate axes whose statistics differ from the rest of the residual stream.
The paper investigates why the orthogonal optimiser Muon outperforms Adam in large language model pretraining by analysing the spectral properties of Transformer loss landscapes. It finds that Muon’s momentum buffers exhibit an anisotropic spectral profile with a volatile head and a tolerant bulk, enabling larger effective step sizes. Building on this insight, the authors propose Spectral‑Aware Muon (SAMuon) and a lightweight variant, which adjust the bulk scaling while keeping the head unchanged, achieving 13–24 % fewer training tokens than Muon without extra FLOPs.