Transformer Layers as Painters
Authors: name: Qi Sun, name: Marc Pickett, name: Aakash Kumar Nain, name: Llion Jones

Despite their nearly universal adoption for large language models, the
internal workings of transformers are not well understood. We aim to better
understand the impact of removing or reorganizing information throughout the
layers of a pretrained transformer. Such an understanding could both yield
better usage of existing models as well as to make architectural improvements
to produce new variants. We present a series of empirical studies on frozen
models that show that the lower and final layers of pretrained transformers
differ from middle layers, but that middle layers have a surprising amount of
uniformity. We further show that some classes of problems have robustness to
skipping layers, running the layers in an order different from how they were
trained, or running the layers in parallel. Our observations suggest that even
frozen pretrained models may gracefully trade accuracy for latency by skipping
layers or running layers in parallel.