A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name “Transformers”, the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm for BERT, and Pre-LayerNorm for GPT and vision Transformers.
We call for the development ofFoundation Transformerfortrue general-purpose modeling, which serves as a go-to architecture for various tasks and modalities with guaranteed training stability.
In this work, we introduce a Transformer variant, namedMagneto, to fulfill the goal.
Specifically, we propose Sub-LayerNorm for good expressivity, and the initialization strategy theoretically derived from DeepNetfor stable scaling up.
Extensive experiments demonstrate its superior performance and better stability than the de facto Transformer variants designed for various applications, including language modeling (i.e., BERT, and GPT) , machine translation, vision pretraining (i.e., BEiT) , speech recognition, and multimodal pretraining (i.e., BEiT-3) .