GradMax: Growing Neural Networks using Gradient Information
Authors: Utku Evci,Bart van Merrienboer,Thomas Unterthiner,Fabian Pedregosa,Max Vladymyrov
ICLR 2022,Poster

Abstract: The architecture and the parameters of neural networks are often optimized independently, which requires costly retraining of the parameters whenever the architecture is modified. In this work we instead focus on growing the architecture without requiring costly retraining. We present a method that adds new neurons during training without impacting what is already learned, while improving the training dynamics. We achieve the latter by maximizing the gradients of the new weights  and  efficiently  find  the  optimal  initialization  by  means  of  the  singular value decomposition (SVD). We call this technique Gradient Maximizing Growth (GradMax) and demonstrate its effectiveness in variety of vision tasks and architectures. We open sourced our code at https://github.com/google-research/growneuron