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BranchNorm: Robustly Scaling Extremely Deep Transformers

2023/05/04 by Yijin Liu, Liu, Yijin, Zeng, Xianfeng +4
Computer Science · #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis #Machine Learning (cs.LG)

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.02790

openalex publication_date 2023/05/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Recently, DeepNorm scales Transformers into extremely deep (i.e., 1000 layers) and reveals the promising potential of deep scaling. To stabilize the training of deep models, DeepNorm (Wang et al., 2022) attempts to constrain the model update to a constant value. Although applying such a constraint can benefit the early stage of model training, it may lead to undertrained models during the whole training procedure. In this paper, we propose BranchNorm, which dynamically rescales the non-residual branch of Transformer in accordance with the training period. BranchNorm not only theoretically stabilizes the training with smooth gradient norms at the early stage, but also encourages better convergence in the subsequent training stage. Experiment results on multiple translation tasks demonstrate that BranchNorm achieves a better trade-off between training stability and converge performance.

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