Transformer Architecture · 2019

Root Mean Square Layer Normalization (RMSNorm)

Biao Zhang, Rico Sennrich

Introduced RMSNorm, which normalizes activations by their root-mean-square alone and drops the mean-centering and bias of LayerNorm, cutting normalization cost while keeping training stability.

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Plain-language summary

RMSNorm rescales each activation vector by its root-mean-square magnitude and applies a learned gain, skipping the mean-subtraction step that standard LayerNorm performs. The authors argue the re-centering in LayerNorm contributes little and that re-scaling is what actually stabilizes training. The result is fewer operations and less compute per layer at comparable accuracy, which is why it replaced LayerNorm in LLaMA and many later transformer stacks.

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Provenance

Record ID
P-003
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

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