Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 27, 2026

Hidden layer

In artificial neural networks, a hidden layer is a layer of artificial neurons that is neither an input layer nor an output layer. The simplest examples appear in multilayer perceptrons (MLP), as illustrated in the diagram.

Last revised
May 27, 2026
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Example of hidden layers in a MLP source ↗

In artificial neural networks, a hidden layer is a layer of artificial neurons that is neither an input layer nor an output layer. The simplest examples appear in multilayer perceptrons (MLP), as illustrated in the diagram.1

An MLP without any hidden layer is essentially just a linear model. With hidden layers and activation functions, however, nonlinearity is introduced into the model.1

In typical machine learning practice, the weights and biases are initialized, then iteratively updated during training via backpropagation.1

References

References

  1. Zhang, Aston; Lipton, Zachary; Li, Mu; Smola, Alexander J. (2024). "5.1. Multilayer Perceptrons". Dive into deep learning. Cambridge New York Port Melbourne New Delhi Singapore: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-38943-3.