Papers › What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?
What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?
Vivek Ramanujan, Mitchell Wortsman, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari
Training a neural network is synonymous with learning the values of the weights. By contrast, we demonstrate that randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks which achieve impressive performance without ever training the weight values. Hidden in a randomly weighted Wide ResNet-50 we show that there is a subnetwork (with random weights) that is smaller than, but matches the performance of a ResNet-34 trained on ImageNet. Not only do these "untrained subnetworks" exist, but we provide an algorithm to effectively find them. We empirically show that as randomly weighted neural networks with fixed weights grow wider and deeper, an "untrained subnetwork" approaches a network with learned weights in accuracy. Our code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/allenai/hidden-networks.
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Code
Syntology Ran 2 of 9 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 7 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 1 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran with no contract checked.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
9 samples harvested; 2 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 7 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.
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Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “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.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | ImageNet | Wide ResNet-50 (edge-popup) | Number of params | 20.6M | #988 of 1060 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Classification | ImageNet | Wide ResNet-50 (edge-popup) | Top 1 Accuracy | 73.3% | #988 of 1060 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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