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:2609.15229v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We propose a pre-fine-tuning probing method for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) layer selection, aiming to obtain more stable and higher gains...
By Qingtao Xia, Jiahua Bao, Siyao Cheng, Jie Liu
arXiv:2510. 09904v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite their widespread use, training deep Transformers can be unstable.
By Kelvin Kan, Xingjian Li, Benjamin J. Zhang, Tuhin Sahai, Stanley Osher, Krishna Kumar, Markos A. Katsoulakis
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:2609.37631v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Transformers are typically trained from random initialization, requiring all their capabilities to emerge from large-scale optimization. Recent work sh...
By Zachary Shinnick, Christian Intern\`o, Hemanth Saratchandran, Anton van den Hengel, Damien Teney
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