The Curse of Depth in Large Language Models

[arxiv] [code]

We present the Curse of Depth, a phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs) where deeper layers contribute less effectively to training due to the widespread use of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). Our analysis identifies this issue as a key bottleneck in LLM optimization and proposes LayerNorm Scaling as a solution to mitigate its impact.

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce the Curse of Depth, a concept that highlights, explains, and addresses the recent observation in modern Large Language Models (LLMs) where nearly half of the layers are less effective than expected. We first confirm the wide existence of this phenomenon across the most popular families of LLMs such as Llama, Mistral, DeepSeek, and Qwen. Our analysis, theoretically and empirically, identifies that the underlying reason for the ineffectiveness of deep layers in LLMs is the widespread usage of Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN). While Pre-LN stabilizes the training of Transformer LLMs, its output variance exponentially grows with the model depth, which undesirably causes the derivative of the deep Transformer blocks to be an identity matrix, and therefore barely contributes to the training. To resolve this training pitfall, we propose LayerNorm Scaling, which scales the variance of output of the layer normalization inversely by the square root of its depth. This simple modification mitigates the output variance explosion of deeper Transformer layers, improving their contribution. Our experimental results, spanning model sizes from 130M to 1B, demonstrate that LayerNorm Scaling significantly enhances LLM pre-training performance compared to Pre-LN. Moreover, this improvement seamlessly carries over to supervised fine-tuning. All these gains can be attributed to the fact that LayerNorm Scaling enables deeper layers to contribute more effectively during training.

We have uploaded the trained weights for the 1B model using LayerNorm Scaling (CoD).

📚Citation

@article{sun2025curse,
  title={The Curse of Depth in Large Language Models},
  author={Sun, Wenfang and Song, Xinyuan and Li, Pengxiang and Yin, Lu and Zheng, Yefeng and Liu, Shiwei},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05795},
  year={2025}
}