Transformers without Normalization
Authors: name: Jiachen Zhu; name: Xinlei Chen; name: Kaiming He; name: Yann LeCun; name: Zhuang Liu
Published: 2025-03-13 17:59:06

Abstract: Normalization layers are ubiquitous in modern neural networks and have long
been considered essential. This work demonstrates that Transformers without
normalization can achieve the same or better performance using a remarkably
simple technique. We introduce Dynamic Tanh (DyT), an element-wise operation
DyT(x) = tanh(alpha x), as a drop-in replacement for normalization
layers in Transformers. DyT is inspired by the observation that layer
normalization in Transformers often produces tanh-like, S-shaped input-output
mappings. By incorporating DyT, Transformers without normalization can match or
exceed the performance of their normalized counterparts, mostly without
hyperparameter tuning. We validate the effectiveness of Transformers with DyT
across diverse settings, ranging from recognition to generation, supervised to
self-supervised learning, and computer vision to language models. These
findings challenge the conventional understanding that normalization layers are
indispensable in modern neural networks, and offer new insights into their role
in deep networks.