weight
A weight is a learned scalar or tensor parameter that modulates the contribution of an input or intermediate signal through a linear or affine transformation, determining how strongly it influences the model’s output.
In neural networks, weights connect units within and across layers and are updated during training by gradient-based optimization.
They’re typically initialized from specific distributions and may be regularized with techniques like weight decay. They can be shared across positions as in convolutions or attention projections.
In practice, weights also refers collectively to a trained model’s full set of learned parameters. That artifact is what gets released, downloaded, quantized, and fine-tuned, as in an open-weights model.
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By Leodanis Pozo Ramos • Updated Aug. 25, 2026