新闻 · arXiv cs.LG

Transforming Rank: How Architecture Navigates the Spectral Pathologies of 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. We show that skip connections trade off rank collapse against…