arXiv:2601.01014cs.LGcs.AI2026-01

深的Transformer会因几何失控导致表征退化,新模型通过约束更新方向和动态删除冗余信息解决此问题。

Geometric and Dynamic Scaling in Deep Transformers

  • 用几何约束和动态删减机制,让深层更新不再盲目累积特征。
  • 在超深网络(100层以上)中保持表征秩不下降,避免退化坍塌。
  • 适合研究超深模型稳定性的学者,或想改进Transformer架构的工程师。

尽管深度变换器在实践中表现优异,但过度加深常导致表征冗余、秩降低甚至崩溃。现有解释多归因于优化不稳定或梯度消失,但无法说明在现代归一化与初始化下仍会发生崩溃的原因。本文认为,深层变换器的崩溃本质上是几何问题:标准残差更新隐含假设特征积累始终有益,却缺乏对更新方向的约束或过时信息的清除机制。随着深度增加,这导致特征系统性偏离语义流形,产生单调特征累积,引发表征退化。我们提出统一的几何框架,包含两个正交原则:第一,流形约束超连接将残差更新限制在局部切线方向,防止流形漂移;第二,深层增量学习引入数据依赖的非单调更新,支持冗余特征的反射与擦除,而非无条件累积。两者协同使特征更新的方向与符号解耦,实现深层的稳定几何演化。由此提出的结构称为流形几何变换器(MGT)。分析预测,强制几何有效性并允许动态擦除,是避免超深网络秩崩溃的关键。我们设计了评估超过100层变换器的协议,验证几何而非深度本身才是深层表征学习的瓶颈。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Despite their empirical success, pushing Transformer architectures to extreme depth often leads to a paradoxical failure: representations become increasingly redundant, lose rank, and ultimately collapse. Existing explanations largely attribute this phenomenon to optimization instability or vanishing gradients, yet such accounts fail to explain why collapse persists even under modern normalization and initialization schemes. In this paper, we argue that the collapse of deep Transformers is fundamentally a geometric problem. Standard residual updates implicitly assume that feature accumulation is always beneficial, but offer no mechanism to constrain update directions or to erase outdated information. As depth increases, this leads to systematic drift off the semantic manifold and monotonic feature accumulation, causing representational degeneracy. We propose a unified geometric framework that addresses these failures through two orthogonal principles. First, manifold-constrained hyper-connections restrict residual updates to valid local tangent directions, preventing uncontrolled manifold drift. Second, deep delta learning introduces data-dependent, non-monotonic updates that enable reflection and erasure of redundant features rather than their unconditional accumulation. Together, these mechanisms decouple the direction and sign of feature updates, yielding a stable geometric evolution across depth. We term the resulting architecture the Manifold-Geometric Transformer (MGT). Our analysis predicts that enforcing geometric validity while allowing dynamic erasure is essential for avoiding rank collapse in ultra-deep networks. We outline an evaluation protocol for Transformers exceeding 100 layers to test the hypothesis that geometry, rather than depth itself, is the key limiting factor in deep representation learning.

Transformer深度学习几何学习表征退化

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。