11 accepted papers
Loss spikes commonly emerge during neural network training with the Adam optimizer across diverse architectures and scales, yet their underlying mechanism remains elusive. While previous explanations attribute these phenomena to sharper loss landscapes at lower loss, we show that landscape geometry …
Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of domains, yet our understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. In this work, we identify a recurrent focus–dilution cycle in attention learning and provide a rigorous explanation in a one-layer Transformer s…
Adam is a widely used optimization algorithm in deep learning, yet the specific class of objective functions where it exhibits inherent advantages remains underexplored. Unlike prior studies requiring external schedulers and $\beta_2$ near 1 for convergence, this work investigates the ``natural'' au…
To significantly advance the capabilities of open-source web agents, we present WebSailor-V2, a complete post-training pipeline encompassing data construction, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Our methodology features two key innovations: (1) On the data front, we devel…
State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as promising alternatives to attention mechanisms, with the Mamba architecture demonstrating impressive performance and linear complexity for processing long sequences. However, the fundamental differences between Mamba and Transformer architectures remain inco…
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing by demonstrating exceptional performance across diverse tasks. This study investigates the impact of the parameter initialization scale on the training behavior and task preferences of LLMs. We discover th…
Large language models have consistently struggled with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. Investigating the internal reasoning mechanisms of these models can help us design better model architectures and training strategies, ultimately enhancing their reasoning capability
Transformers have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance on compositional problems remains a topic of debate. In this work, we investigate the mechanisms of how transformers behave on unseen compositional tasks. We discover that the parameter initialization scale…
Dropout is a widely utilized regularization technique in the training of neural networks, nevertheless, its underlying mechanism and impact on achieving good generalization abilities remain to be further understood. In this work, we start by undertaking a rigorous theoretical derivation of the stoch…
Substantial work indicates that the dynamics of neural networks (NNs) is closely related to their initialization of parameters. Inspired by the phase diagram for two-layer ReLU NNs with infinite width (Luo et al., 2021), we make a step towards drawing a phase diagram for three-layer ReLU NNs with in…
Empirical works show that for ReLU neural networks (NNs) with small initialization, input weights of hidden neurons (the input weight of a hidden neuron consists of the weight from its input layer to the hidden neuron and its bias term) condense onto isolated orientations. The condensation dynamics…