Lipschitz Normalization for Self-Attention Layers with Application to Graph Neural Networks
Attention based neural networks are state of the art in a large range of applications. However, their performance tends to degrade when the number of layers increases. In this work, we show that enforcing Lipschitz continuity by normalizing the attention scores can significantly improve the performance of deep attention models. First, we show that, for deep graph attention networks (GAT), gradient explosion appears during training, leading to poor performance of gradient-based training algorithms. To address this issue, we derive a theoretical analysis of the Lipschitz continuity of attention modules and introduce LipschitzNorm, a simple and parameter-free normalization for self-attention mechanisms that enforces the model to be Lipschitz continuous. We then apply LipschitzNorm to GAT and Graph Transformers and show that their performance is substantially improved in the deep setting (10 to 30 layers). More specifically, we show that a deep GAT model with LipschitzNorm achieves state of the art results for node label prediction tasks that exhibit long-range dependencies, while showing consistent improvements over their unnormalized counterparts in benchmark node classification tasks.
Code (1)
Tasks
Deep AttentionGraph AttentionNode ClassificationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
How Smooth Is Attention?
Self-attention and masked self-attention are at the heart of Transformers' outstanding success. Still, our mathematical understanding of attention, in particular of its Lipschitz properties - which are key when it comes …
No More DeLuLu: Physics-Inspired Kernel Networks for Geometrically-Grounded Neural Computation
We introduce the yat-product, a kernel operator combining quadratic alignment with inverse-square proximity. We prove it is a Mercer kernel, analytic, Lipschitz on bounded domains, and self-regularizing, admitting a uniq…
The Hidden Power of Normalization Layers in Neural Networks: Exponential Capacity Control
Normalization layers are critical components of modern AI systems, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc. Empirically, they are known to stabilize training dynamics and improve generalization ability. However, the under…
A Primal-Dual Framework for Transformers and Neural Networks
Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mecha…
Time SeriesTime Series ClassificationLipschitz Constrained Parameter Initialization for Deep Transformers
The Transformer translation model employs residual connection and layer normalization to ease the optimization difficulties caused by its multi-layer encoder/decoder structure. Previous research shows that even with resi…
DecoderTranslation