Paper ID: 2407.19044

Advancing Neural Network Performance through Emergence-Promoting Initialization Scheme

Johnny Jingze Li, Vivek Kurien George, Gabriel A. Silva

We introduce a novel yet straightforward neural network initialization scheme that modifies conventional methods like Xavier and Kaiming initialization. Inspired by the concept of emergence and leveraging the emergence measures proposed by Li (2023), our method adjusts the layer-wise weight scaling factors to achieve higher emergence values. This enhancement is easy to implement, requiring no additional optimization steps for initialization compared to GradInit. We evaluate our approach across various architectures, including MLP and convolutional architectures for image recognition, and transformers for machine translation. We demonstrate substantial improvements in both model accuracy and training speed, with and without batch normalization. The simplicity, theoretical innovation, and demonstrable empirical advantages of our method make it a potent enhancement to neural network initialization practices. These results suggest a promising direction for leveraging emergence to improve neural network training methodologies. Code is available at: https://github.com/johnnyjingzeli/EmergenceInit.

Submitted: Jul 26, 2024