Numerical influence of ReLU’(0) on backpropagation

Dec 6, 2021

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In theory, the choice of ReLU'(0) in [0,1] for a neural network has a negligible influence both on backpropagation and training. Yet, in the real world, 32 bits default precision combined with the size of deep learning problems makes it a hyperparameter of training methods. We investigate the importance of the value of ReLU'(0) for several precision levels (16, 32, 64 bits), on various networks (fully connected, VGG, ResNet) and datasets (MNIST, CIFAR10, SVHN). We observe a considerable variation of backpropagation outputs which occurs around half of the time in 32 bits precision. The effect disappears with double precision, while it is systematic at 16 bits. For vanilla SGD training, the choice '(0)=0 seems to be the most efficient. We also evidence that reconditioning approaches as batch-norm or ADAM tend to buffer the influence of '(0)'s value. Overall, the message we want to convey is that algorithmic differentiation of nonsmooth problems potentially hides parameters that could be tuned advantageously.

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