SimpleGPT: Improving GPT via A Simple Normalization Strategy

Abstract

In this work, we revisit Transformer optimization through the lens of second-order geometry and establish a direct connection between architectural design, activation scale, the Hessian matrix, and the maximum tolerable learning rate. We introduce a simple normalization strategy, termed SimpleNorm, which stabilizes intermediate activation scales by construction. Then, by analyzing the Hessian of the loss with respect to network activations, we theoretically show that SimpleNorm significantly reduces the spectral norm of the Hessian, thereby permitting larger stable learning rates. We validate our theoretical findings through extensive experiments on large GPT models at parameter scales 1B, 1.4B, 7B and 8B. Empirically, SimpleGPT, our SimpleNorm-based network, tolerates learning rates 3$\times$-10$\times$ larger than standard convention, consistently demonstrates strong optimization stability, and achieves substantially better performance than well-established baselines. Specifically, when training 7B-scale models for 60K steps, SimpleGPT reduces the training loss from 2.290 to 2.208 compared with Llama2 with QKNorm. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ocram7/SimpleGPT.