A Robust Initialization of Residual Blocks for Effective ResNet Training Without Batch Normalization.

Civitelli, Enrico; Sortino, Alessio; Lapucci, Matteo; Bagattini, Francesco; Galvan, Giulio · IEEE Trans Neural Netw Learn Syst · 2025

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Batch normalization is an essential component of all state-of-the-art neural networks architectures. However, since it introduces many practical issues, much recent research has been devoted to designing normalization-free architectures. In this brief, we show that weights initialization is key to train ResNet-like normalization-free networks. In particular, we propose a slight modification to the summation operation of a block output to the skip-connection branch, so that the whole network is correctly initialized. We show that this modified architecture achieves competitive results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet without further regularization nor algorithmic modifications.