Mid-level interview questionAsked at Mistral AI · interview write-up
How does RMSNorm differ from LayerNorm, and why do recent models use it?
Model answer
LayerNorm subtracts the mean, divides by the standard deviation, then applies a learned scale and shift. RMSNorm skips the mean: it divides by the root mean square and keeps only the scale. That's less computation with comparable quality in the paper's experiments, so models like Llama use it, in the same pre-norm positions.
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