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What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network? (arxiv.org)
3 points by asdfadf123123 on Dec 4, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A big neural network with random weights hides a smaller subnetwork that works without any training; an algorithm finds which connections to keep. One such subnetwork matched a larger network trained on photos, and bigger random networks hid subnetworks closer to trained accuracy.

Abstract

Training a neural network is synonymous with learning the values of the weights. By contrast, we demonstrate that randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks which achieve impressive performance without ever training the weight values. Hidden in a randomly weighted Wide ResNet-50 we show that there is a subnetwork (with random weights) that is smaller than, but matches the performance of a ResNet-34 trained on ImageNet. Not only do these "untrained subnetworks" exist, but we provide an algorithm to effectively find them. We empirically show that as randomly weighted neural networks with fixed weights grow wider and deeper, an "untrained subnetwork" approaches a network with learned weights in accuracy. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/allenai/hidden-networks.

Vivek Ramanujan, Mitchell Wortsman, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari
arXiv:1911.13299 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Nov 29, 2019 · updated Mar 31, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to CVPR 2020

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Also discussed: Apr 2020 (2 points, 0 comments) · Dec 2019 (4 points, 0 comments)