Normalization Pruning (NoNorm)

Some research has suggested that the "normalization" layer in Transformers can be pruned without a major loss in model accuracy. This is similar to other Transformer optimization techniques involving architectural changes, such as FFN pruning and shallow decoder architectures.

Norm Pruning: Book Excerpts and Blog Articles

Free online book excerpts with full text chapters online and free PDF downloads, and the Aussie AI blog, including related articles:

• David Spuler, March 2024, Norm Pruning, in Generative AI in C++, https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch24-norm-pruning
• David Spuler, March 2024, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.aussieai.com/book/toc PDF: https://www.aussieai.com/pdf/BOOK-Generative-AI-CPP-Spuler-2024.pdf
• David Spuler, May 31st, 2026, Chapter 31. Normalization, in book LLM Inference Optimization: State-of-the-Art Research, Table of Contents: https://www.aussieai.com/book/llm-inference-optimization https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3FKR39T

Research on Norm Pruning

There have been a few research papers that investigated the need for the "normalization" components in Transformers, and whether it can be removed, which is sometimes called "norm pruning" or "NoNorm".

• Chen, M. X., Firat, O., Bapna, A., Johnson, M., Macherey, W., Foster, G., Jones, L., Schuster, M., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Vaswani, A., Uszkoreit, J., Kaiser, L., Chen, Z., Wu, Y., and Hughes, M. The best of both worlds: Combining recent advances in neural machine translation. In ACL, 2018, https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.09849
• Ma, J. and Yarats, D. On the adequacy of untuned warmup for adaptive optimization. arXiv:1910.04209, 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.04209
• Hongyi Zhang, Yann N. Dauphin, Tengyu Ma, Fixup Initialization: Residual Learning Without Normalization, Mar 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.09321
• Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Edouard Grave, Guillaume Lample, Herve Jegou, and Armand Joulin. 2019. Augmenting Self-attention with Persistent Memory. arXiv:1907.01470 https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01470
• Xiao Shi Huang, Felipe Perez, Jimmy Ba, and Maksims Volkovs. 2020. Improving transformer optimization through better initialization. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML), pages 4475-4483, https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/huang20f.html Code: https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/T-Fixup
• Wang, Q., Li, B., Xiao, T., Zhu, J., Li, C., Wong, D., and Chao, L. Learning deep transformer models for machine translation. In ACL, 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.01787
• Nguyen, T. and Salazar, J., Transformers without tears: Improving the normalization of self-attention. In arXiv:1910.05895, 2019. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.05895
• Liu, L., Jiang, H., He, P., Chen, W., Liu, X., Gao, J., and Han, J. On the variance of the adaptive learning rate and beyond. In ICLR, 2020 https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.03265 Code: https://github.com/LiyuanLucasLiu/RAdam
• Tianyang Lin, Yuxin Wang, Xiangyang Liu, and Xipeng Qiu. A survey of transformers. AI Open, 2022. https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04554 (Survey paper with some analysis of the needs for various Transformer components including normalization; see "Section 5.2.3 Normalization-free Transformer".)
• Thomas Bachlechner, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Huanru Henry Mao, Garrison W. Cottrell, and Julian J. McAuley. 2020. ReZero is All You Need: Fast Convergence at Large Depth. CoRR abs/2003.04887 (2020). arXiv:2003.04887 https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.04887
• Sharath Nittur Sridhar, Anthony Sarah, and Sairam Sundaresan. TrimBERT: Tailoring BERT for Trade-offs. arXiv:2202.12411 [cs], February 2022. http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.12411 (Optimizations include softmax replacement and removing half of all LayerNorms.)
• David Spuler, March 2024, Chapter 24. Normalization, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CXJKCWX9
• Bobby He, Thomas Hofmann, 31 May 2024 (v2), Simplifying Transformer Blocks, https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.01906 (Examines the removal of various Transformer sublayer components including skip connections, projection/value parameters, and normalization.)
• David Spuler, March 2024, Norm Pruning, in Generative AI in C++, https://www.aussieai.com/book/ch24-norm-pruning
• James Martens, Andy Ballard, Guillaume Desjardins, Grzegorz Swirszcz, Valentin Dalibard, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Samuel S. Schoenholz, 5 Oct 2021, Rapid training of deep neural networks without skip connections or normalization layers using Deep Kernel Shaping, https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.01765
• Nandan Kumar Jha, Brandon Reagen, 12 Oct 2024, ReLU's Revival: On the Entropic Overload in Normalization-Free Large Language Models, https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.09637
• Anonymous authors, Oct 2024, Dense Attention: No-CCompromise Exact All NxN Interactions Algorithm with O(N) Space and Time Complexity, https://openreview.net/pdf?id=2bIQBDSfRk
• Jiachen Zhu, Xinlei Chen, Kaiming He, Yann LeCun, Zhuang Liu, 13 Mar 2025, Transformers without Normalization, https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10622 (Using a tanh variant to avoid normalization such as LayerNorm.)
• Dr. Ashish Bamania, July 2025, You Don’t Need Normalization In Transformers Anymore, A deep dive into the internals of Layer Normalization, and how a simple function called Dynamic Tanh (DyT) can replace them entirely in the Transformer architecture without any loss in performance, https://ai.gopubby.com/you-dont-need-normalization-in-transformers-anymore-0c737e846b91
• Jiachen Zhu, Xinlei Chen, Kaiming He, Yann LeCun, Zhuang Liu, 14 Jun 2025 (v2), Transformers without Normalization, https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10622v2 https://jiachenzhu.github.io/DyT/
• David Spuler, March 2024, Generative AI in C++: Coding Transformers and LLMs, https://www.aussieai.com/book/toc PDF: https://www.aussieai.com/pdf/BOOK-Generative-AI-CPP-Spuler-2024.pdf
• Nils Graef, Filip Makraduli, Andrew Wasielewski, Matthew Clapp, 24 Apr 2026 (v5), FlashNorm: Fast Normalization for Transformers, https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09577 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXiv240709577G/abstract https://youtu.be/GEuJv34_XgU?si https://github.com/OpenMachine-ai/transformer-tricks
• Callum McLean, Luke Y. Prince, Alexandre Payot, Paul Balança, Carlo Luschi, 13 Mar 2026, MXNorm: Reusing MXFP block scales for efficient tensor normalisation, https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13180
• David Spuler, May 31st, 2026, Chapter 31. Normalization, in book LLM Inference Optimization: State-of-the-Art Research, Table of Contents: https://www.aussieai.com/book/llm-inference-optimization https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3FKR39T

More Research on Pruning Types

• Depth pruning (overview)
  — Static layer pruning
  — Layer pruning
  — Early exit
  — Dynamic layer pruning
  — Layer skipping
  — Layer approximation
  — Shallow decoder architecture
  — Layer reordering
  — Layer Importance
• Width pruning (overview)
  — Attention head pruning
  — Slimmable networks (width pruning)
  — FFN pruning
  — Channel pruning
  — Filter pruning
• Length pruning (longitudinal/input/end-to-end):
  — Token pruning (input pruning)
  — Dynamic token pruning
  — Prompt compression
  — Context compression
  — Token merging
  — Token skipping
  — Token dropping
  — Zero padding removal
• Embedding-dimension pruning
  — Embedding pruning
  — Embedding matrix compression (embedding pruning)
  — Embedding low-rank matrix factorization
  — Unembedding matrix (output embeddings)
• Multi-dimensional pruning
  — Dual pruning
  — Triple pruning
  — Quadruple pruning
  — 3D CNN model pruning

More AI Research

Read more about:

• Normalization optimizations
• Layer pruning
• Token pruning
• Attention head pruning
• Embeddings pruning
• FFN pruning
• Shallow decoder architecture
• Length pruning
• Width pruning
• Channel pruning
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