Principled Weight Initialization for Hypernetworks

Oscar Chang, Lampros Flokas, Hod Lipson

Abstract: Hypernetworks are meta neural networks that generate weights for a main neural network in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Despite extensive applications ranging from multi-task learning to Bayesian deep learning, the problem of optimizing hypernetworks has not been studied to date. We observe that classical weight initialization methods like Glorot & Bengio (2010) and He et al. (2015), when applied directly on a hypernet, fail to produce weights for the mainnet in the correct scale. We develop principled techniques for weight initialization in hypernets, and show that they lead to more stable mainnet weights, lower training loss, and faster convergence.

Keywords: hypernetworks, initialization, optimization, meta-learning

TL;DR: The first principled weight initialization method for hypernetworks