Papers › Foundation Transformers

Foundation Transformers

12 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.06423archive 2025-07-28

Hongyu Wang, Shuming Ma, Shaohan Huang, Li Dong, Wenhui Wang, Zhiliang Peng, Yu Wu, Payal Bajaj, Saksham Singhal, Alon Benhaim, Barun Patra, Zhun Liu, Vishrav Chaudhary, Xia Song, Furu Wei

A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name "Transformers", the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm for BERT, and Pre-LayerNorm for GPT and vision Transformers. We call for the development of Foundation Transformer for true general-purpose modeling, which serves as a go-to architecture for various tasks and modalities with guaranteed training stability. In this work, we introduce a Transformer variant, named Magneto, to fulfill the goal. Specifically, we propose Sub-LayerNorm for good expressivity, and the initialization strategy theoretically derived from DeepNet for stable scaling up. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and better stability than the de facto Transformer variants designed for various applications, including language modeling (i.e., BERT, and GPT), machine translation, vision pretraining (i.e., BEiT), speech recognition, and multimodal pretraining (i.e., BEiT-3).

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microsoft/unilm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
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microsoft/torchscale mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
qwopqwop200/Magneto-pytorch mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingMachine TranslationSpeech Recognition

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDiscriminative Fine-TuningDropoutGPTLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight DecayWordPiece

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