Frankle and Carbin discover so-called winning tickets, subset of weights of a neural network that are sufficient to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy. The lottery hypothesis states that dense networks contain subnetworks – the winning tickets – that can reach the same accuracy when trained in isolation, from scratch. The key insight is that these subnetworks seem to have received optimal initialization. Then, given a complex trained network for, e.g., Cifar, weights are pruned based on their absolute value – i.e., weights with small absolute value are pruned first. The remaining network is trained from scratch using the original initialization and reaches competitive performance using less than 10% of the original weights. As soon as the subnetwork is re-initialized, these results cannot be reproduced though. This suggests that these subnetworks obtained some sort of “optimal” initialization for learning.
Frankle and Carbin discover so-called winning tickets, subset of weights of a neural network that are sufficient to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy. The lottery hypothesis states that dense networks contain subnetworks – the winning tickets – that can reach the same accuracy when trained in isolation, from scratch. The key insight is that these subnetworks seem to have received optimal initialization. Then, given a complex trained network for, e.g., Cifar, weights are pruned based on their absolute value – i.e., weights with small absolute value are pruned first. The remaining network is trained from scratch using the original initialization and reaches competitive performance using less than 10% of the original weights. As soon as the subnetwork is re-initialized, these results cannot be reproduced though. This suggests that these subnetworks obtained some sort of “optimal” initialization for learning.