Revisiting Batch Norm Initialization
This work addresses a specific issue in deep neural network training for researchers and practitioners, offering an incremental improvement to BN.
The paper tackles the problem of batch normalization (BN) initialization leading to overly large values and minimal parameter changes during training, proposing a new initialization method and update approach that improves performance without extra computational cost.
Batch normalization (BN) is comprised of a normalization component followed by an affine transformation and has become essential for training deep neural networks. Standard initialization of each BN in a network sets the affine transformation scale and shift to 1 and 0, respectively. However, after training we have observed that these parameters do not alter much from their initialization. Furthermore, we have noticed that the normalization process can still yield overly large values, which is undesirable for training. We revisit the BN formulation and present a new initialization method and update approach for BN to address the aforementioned issues. Experiments are designed to emphasize and demonstrate the positive influence of proper BN scale initialization on performance, and use rigorous statistical significance tests for evaluation. The approach can be used with existing implementations at no additional computational cost. Source code is available at https://github.com/osu-cvl/revisiting-bn-init.