Attention Saturation and Gradient Suppression at Inflection Layers: Diagnosing and Mitigating Bottlenecks in Transformer Adaptation

arXiv — cs.LGTuesday, November 4, 2025 at 5:00:00 AM
A recent study on pre-trained Transformers reveals that they often struggle with over-confidence in existing patterns and face challenges when adapting to new target domains during fine-tuning. The research highlights how output saturation can lead to gradient suppression, which limits the model's ability to reconstruct low-level features while only allowing high-level feature recombination. This understanding is crucial for improving the adaptability of Transformers in various applications, ensuring they can better learn and generalize from new data.
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