Title: Cutting the Skip: Training Residual-Free Transformers
Primary area: unsupervised, self-supervised, semi-supervised, and supervised representation learning
Keywords: Vision Transformers, Skip Connections, Network Conditionin

Abstract: Transformers have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, a feat often attributed to their scalability. Yet training them without residual (skip) connections remains notoriously difficult. While skips stabilize optimization, they also disrupt the hierarchical structure of representations, raising the long-standing question of whether transformers can be trained efficiently without them. In this work, we address this problem by analyzing the Jacobian of a skipless transformer block, showing why residuals improve conditioning and revealing that their stabilization benefits can be recovered through a principled initialization strategy. Building on this insight, we introduce the first method that enables stable and efficient training of skipless transformers without altering the standard architecture. We validate our approach on Vision Transformers (ViTs) in both supervised and self-supervised settings, demonstrating that skipless ViTs trained with our initialization overcome the usual optimization barriers, learn richer hierarchical representations, and outperform strong residual baselines on dense prediction benchmarks. These results show that skip connections are not a fundamental requirement for training ViTs and open new avenues for hierarchical representation learning in vision models.