{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/relu-s-revival-on-the-entropic-overload-in","title":"ReLU's Revival: On the Entropic Overload in Normalization-Free Large Language Models","arxiv_id":"2410.09637","date":"2024-10-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nandan Kumar Jha","Brandon Reagen"],"abstract":"LayerNorm is a critical component in modern large language models (LLMs) for stabilizing training and ensuring smooth optimization. However, it introduces significant challenges in mechanistic interpretability, outlier feature suppression, faithful signal propagation, and computational and communication complexity of private inference. This work explores desirable activation functions in normalization-free decoder-only LLMs. Contrary to the conventional preference for the GELU in transformer-based models, our empirical findings demonstrate an {\\em opposite trend} -- ReLU significantly outperforms GELU in LayerNorm-free models, leading to an {\\bf 8.2\\%} perplexity improvement. We discover a key issue with GELU, where early layers experience entropic overload, leading to the under-utilization of the representational capacity of attention heads. This highlights that smoother activations like GELU are {\\em ill-suited} for LayerNorm-free architectures, whereas ReLU's geometrical properties -- specialization in input space and intra-class selectivity -- lead to improved learning dynamics and better information retention in the absence of LayerNorm. This study offers key insights for optimizing transformer architectures where LayerNorm introduces significant challenges. The code and implementation are available at https://github.com/Nandan91/relu-revival-normfree","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09637v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.09637v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"relu-s-revival-on-the-entropic-overload-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/nandan91/relu-revival-normfree","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"relu","method_name":"ReLU"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2410.09637","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2410.09637","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2410.09637"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/nandan91/relu-revival-normfree","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"9023956c978b1666","entry":"convertGPT2model","repo":"nandan91/relu-revival-normfree","repo_kind":"official","path":"normfree_transformers/model_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/nandan91/relu-revival-normfree/blob/HEAD/normfree_transformers/model_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9023956c978b1666"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}