Neural Foundations · 2016

Layer Normalization

Jimmy Lei Ba, Jamie Ryan Kiros, Geoffrey Hinton

Introduced layer normalization, which normalizes activations across the features of a single training example rather than across the batch, removing batch-size dependence and making normalization usable in recurrent networks and at inference on single examples.

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

The method computes each layer's normalization statistics over the units within one example, so behavior is identical during training and testing and does not depend on batch composition. This made it effective for RNNs and sequence models where batch normalization worked poorly, stabilizing and speeding up training. Layer normalization became standard in Transformer architectures.

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Antecedents

Descendants

  • GeneralizesEvidence: Strongly supported

    Batch Normalization

    LayerNorm adapts BatchNorm for sequences

    A-010

Source record

Provenance

Record ID
A-010
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

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