# GLU Variants Improve Transformer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05202 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1,804 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Feb 2020.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

Gated Linear Units (arXiv:1612.08083) consist of the component-wise product of two linear projections, one of which is first passed through a sigmoid function. Variations on GLU are possible, using different nonlinear (or even linear) functions in place of sigmoid. We test these variants in the feed-forward sublayers of the Transformer (arXiv:1706.03762) sequence-to-sequence model, and find that some of them yield quality improvements over the typically-used ReLU or GELU activations.