You Do Not Fully Utilize Transformer's Representation Capacity
Authors: name: Gleb Gerasimov; name: Yaroslav Aksenov; name: Nikita Balagansky; name: Viacheslav Sinii; name: Daniil Gavrilov
Published: 2025-02-13 12:00:50

Abstract: In contrast to RNNs, which compress previous tokens into a single hidden
state, Transformers can attend to all previous tokens directly. However,
standard Transformers only use representations from the immediately preceding
layer. In this paper, we show that this design choice causes representation
collapse and leads to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we
introduce Layer-Integrated Memory (LIMe), a simple yet powerful approach that
preserves the model's overall memory footprint while expanding its
representational capacity by allowing access to hidden states from earlier
layers. Through extensive experiments across various architectures and
different lookup mechanisms, we demonstrate consistent performance improvements
on a wide range of tasks. Moreover, our analysis of the learned representation
dynamics and our exploration of depthwise circuits reveal how LIMe integrates
information across layers, pointing to promising directions for future
research.