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The deep learning literature is continuously updated with new architectures and training techniques. However, weight initialization is overlooked by most recent research, despite some intriguing findings regarding random weights. On the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Leonardo Scabini , Bernard De Baets , Odemir M. Bruno

The selection of initial parameter values for gradient-based optimization of deep neural networks is one of the most impactful hyperparameter choices in deep learning systems, affecting both convergence times and model performance. Yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-17 Wei Hu , Lechao Xiao , Jeffrey Pennington

Initialization of neural network parameters, such as weights and biases, has a crucial impact on learning performance; if chosen well, we can even avoid the need for additional training with backpropagation. For example, algorithms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hikaru Homma , Jun Ohkubo

Training a high-quality deep neural network requires choosing suitable hyperparameters, which is a non-trivial and expensive process. Current works try to automatically optimize or design principles of hyperparameters, such that they can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Wuyang Chen , Junru Wu , Zhangyang Wang , Boris Hanin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Ingo Steinwart

We present some novel, straightforward methods for training the connection graph of a randomly initialized neural network without training the weights. These methods do not use hyperparameters defining cutoff thresholds and therefore remove…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Cristian Ivan , Razvan Florian

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) and neuromorphic computing offer bio-inspired advantages such as sparsity and ultra-low power consumption, providing a promising alternative to conventional networks. However, training deep SNNs from scratch…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Aurora Micheli , Olaf Booij , Jan van Gemert , Nergis Tömen

Binary neural networks improve computationally efficiency of deep models with a large margin. However, there is still a performance gap between a successful full-precision training and binary training. We bring some insights about why this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Xinlin Li , Vahid Partovi Nia

Training a neural network (NN) depends on multiple factors, including but not limited to the initial weights. In this paper, we focus on initializing deep NN parameters such that it performs better, comparing to random or zero…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Mohamad H. Danesh

Appropriate weight initialization has been of key importance to successfully train neural networks. Recently, batch normalization has diminished the role of weight initialization by simply normalizing each layer based on batch statistics.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Pedro Hermosilla , Michael Schelling , Tobias Ritschel , Timo Ropinski

This work provides an additional step in the theoretical understanding of neural networks. We consider neural networks with one hidden layer and show that when learning symmetric functions, one can choose initial conditions so that standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Ido Nachum , Amir Yehudayoff

Even though dense networks have lost importance today, they are still used as final logic elements. It could be shown that these dense networks can be simplified by the sparse graph interpretation. This in turn shows that the information…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Thomas Pircher , Dominik Haspel , Eberhard Schlücker

In past few years, various initialization schemes have been proposed. These schemes are glorot initialization, He initialization, initialization using orthogonal matrix, random walk method for initialization. Some of these methods stress on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Vijay Pandey

Informed by the basic geometry underlying feed forward neural networks, we initialize the weights of the first layer of a neural network using the linear discriminants which best distinguish individual classes. Networks initialized in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-19 Marissa Masden , Dev Sinha

Deep neural networks are known to suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients as depth increases, a phenomenon closely tied to the spectral behavior of the input-output Jacobian. Prior work has identified critical initialization schemes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Benjamin Dadoun , Soufiane Hayou , Hanan Salam , Mohamed El Amine Seddik , Pierre Youssef

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a spectrum of graph-related tasks, however concerns persist regarding their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations. While prevailing defense strategies focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Sofiane Ennadir , Johannes F. Lutzeyer , Michalis Vazirgiannis , El Houcine Bergou

This paper investigates multilevel initialization strategies for training very deep neural networks with a layer-parallel multigrid solver. The scheme is based on the continuous interpretation of the training problem as a problem of optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-20 Eric C. Cyr , Stefanie Günther , Jacob B. Schroder

Deep neural networks have significantly alleviated the burden of feature engineering, but comparable efforts are now required to determine effective architectures for these networks. Furthermore, as network sizes have become excessively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Yognjin Lee

Proper weight initialization prior to training has historically been one of the key factors that helped kick off the deep learning revolution. Initialization is even more crucial in "reservoir computing", where the weights of a readout…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tommaso Fioratti , Riccardo Marcaccioli , Francesco Casola

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern deep learning systems is that they typically employ neural network architectures that utilize enormous numbers of parameters, often in the millions and sometimes even in the billions.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-15 Ben Adlam , Jake Levinson , Jeffrey Pennington