arXiv Machine Learning By Ambroise Odonnat, Laetitia Chapel, Romain Tavenard, Ievgen Redko

Vision Transformer Finetuning Benefits from Non-Smooth Components

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

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arXiv AI
Jun 9

A Mechanistic Analysis of Adversarial Fine-tuning of Vision Transformers

arXiv:2606. 07593v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The widespread use of image classification models in high-risk, real-world situations necessitates making these models robust to slight disturbances or perturbations, such as blurring or sharpening, in the input images.

By Hannah Gao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Isha Agarwal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Rachel Ma (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
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.

By Piyush Kaushik Bhattacharyya, Divyanshu Rai, Swastik Singh, Kumar Aakash, Ayush Ranjan, Krutika Verma
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.

By Akiyoshi Tomihari, Issei Sato