English

A Sober Look at Neural Network Initializations

Machine Learning 2019-09-06 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

Initializing the weights and the biases is a key part of the training process of a neural network. Unlike the subsequent optimization phase, however, the initialization phase has gained only limited attention in the literature. In this paper we discuss some consequences of commonly used initialization strategies for vanilla DNNs with ReLU activations. Based on these insights we then develop an alternative initialization strategy. Finally, we present some large scale experiments assessing the quality of the new initialization strategy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1903.11482,
  title  = {A Sober Look at Neural Network Initializations},
  author = {Ingo Steinwart},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.11482},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T08:21:01.302Z