Methods › General › Normalization › Weight Standardization

Weight Standardization

12 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

Introduced by Siyuan Qiao et al. in Micro-Batch Training with Batch-Channel Normalization and Weight Standardization

archive 2025-07-28 Description, source and code snippet are the archive's method entry.

Weight Standardization is a normalization technique that smooths the loss landscape by standardizing the weights in convolutional layers. Different from the previous normalization methods that focus on activations, WS considers the smoothing effects of weights more than just length-direction decoupling. Theoretically, WS reduces the Lipschitz constants of the loss and the gradients. Hence, WS smooths the loss landscape and improves training.

In Weight Standardization, instead of directly optimizing the loss ℒ on the original weights Ŵ, we reparameterize the weights Ŵ as a function of W, i.e. Ŵ=WS(W), and optimize the loss ℒ on W by SGD:

Ŵ = [ Ŵ_(i,j) | Ŵ_(i,j) = W_(i,j) - μ_(W_(i,·))σ_(W_(i,·)+ϵ)]

y = Ŵ*x

where

μ_(W_(i,·)) = 1I∑ⱼ₌₁ᴵW_(i, j), σ_(W_(i,·))=√(1I∑ᵢ₌₁ᴵ(W_(i,j) - μ_(W_(i,·)))²)

Similar to Batch Normalization, WS controls the first and second moments of the weights of each output channel individually in convolutional layers. Note that many initialization methods also initialize the weights in some similar ways. Different from those methods, WS standardizes the weights in a differentiable way which aims to normalize gradients during back-propagation. Note that we do not have any affine transformation on Ŵ. This is because we assume that normalization layers such as BN or GN will normalize this convolutional layer again.

PaperSource

Papers archive 2025-07-28

12 shown of 12, newest first. Repository counts are the archive's code-links table. A Syntology line states what Syntology ran from that paper's harvested code; it is per sample and not a correctness claim.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

20 shown of 30 tasks the archive attaches to papers tagged with this method, by distinct papers. A task without a page in the catalog is plain text.

TaskPapers
Image Classification5
image-classification3
Few-Shot Learning2
Fine-Grained Image Classification2
Transfer Learning2
Active Learning1
Binarization1
Decoder1
Depth Estimation1
Domain Adaptation1
Federated Learning1
GPU1
General Classification1
Image Generation1
Instance Segmentation1
L2 Regularization1
Language Modeling1
Language Modelling1
Monocular Depth Estimation1
Object Detection1

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with Weight Standardization: 2019 to 2024, peak 5 5 0 2019: 2 papers 2019 2020: 1 paper 2020 2021: 5 papers 2021 2022: 0 papers 2022 2023: 2 papers 2023 2024: 2 papers 2024
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (12 dated). Bars are counts, not a trend claim.

Components: the archive holds no method-to-method composition, so PwC's Components table cannot be rebuilt; the Papers list carries no Results column for the same reason (the archive does not join its leaderboard rows to method tags).

Categories archive 2025-07-28

Normalization

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