{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/on-the-biological-plausibility-of-orthogonal","title":"On the biological plausibility of orthogonal initialisation for solving gradient instability in deep neural networks","arxiv_id":"2211.08408","date":"2022-10-27","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nikolay Manchev","Michael Spratling"],"abstract":"Initialising the synaptic weights of artificial neural networks (ANNs) with orthogonal matrices is known to alleviate vanishing and exploding gradient problems. A major objection against such initialisation schemes is that they are deemed biologically implausible as they mandate factorization techniques that are difficult to attribute to a neurobiological process. This paper presents two initialisation schemes that allow a network to naturally evolve its weights to form orthogonal matrices, provides theoretical analysis that pre-training orthogonalisation always converges, and empirically confirms that the proposed schemes outperform randomly initialised recurrent and feedforward networks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.08408v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.08408v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"on-the-biological-plausibility-of-orthogonal","repo_url":"https://github.com/nmanchev/OO-INIT-ANN","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"attribute","task_name":"Attribute"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}