Papers › Deep Learning without Shortcuts: Shaping the Kernel with Tailored Rectifiers

Deep Learning without Shortcuts: Shaping the Kernel with Tailored Rectifiers

15 Mar 2022ICLR 2022 4arXiv:2203.08120archive 2025-07-28

Guodong Zhang, Aleksandar Botev, James Martens

Training very deep neural networks is still an extremely challenging task. The common solution is to use shortcut connections and normalization layers, which are both crucial ingredients in the popular ResNet architecture. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that ResNets behave more like ensembles of shallower networks than truly deep ones. Recently, it was shown that deep vanilla networks (i.e. networks without normalization layers or shortcut connections) can be trained as fast as ResNets by applying certain transformations to their activation functions. However, this method (called Deep Kernel Shaping) isn't fully compatible with ReLUs, and produces networks that overfit significantly more than ResNets on ImageNet. In this work, we rectify this situation by developing a new type of transformation that is fully compatible with a variant of ReLUs -- Leaky ReLUs. We show in experiments that our method, which introduces negligible extra computational cost, achieves validation accuracies with deep vanilla networks that are competitive with ResNets (of the same width/depth), and significantly higher than those obtained with the Edge of Chaos (EOC) method. And unlike with EOC, the validation accuracies we obtain do not get worse with depth.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

24 samples harvested; 14 ran; 7 honoured the contract we drafted; 10 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 24 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections