In the code for nn.Linear, initialisation occurs in the reset_parameters() method. This method calls init.kaiming_uniform_ (see below)
def reset_parameters(self):
init.kaiming_uniform_(self.weight, a=math.sqrt(5))
if self.bias is not None:
fan_in, _ = init._calculate_fan_in_and_fan_out(self.weight)
bound = 1 / math.sqrt(fan_in)
init.uniform_(self.bias, -bound, bound)
Looking at the kaiming_uniform_ function definition, by default it assumes a leaky relu activation, which affects one of the constants used in the initialisation distribution:
def kaiming_uniform_(tensor, a=0, mode='fan_in', nonlinearity='leaky_relu'):
r"""Fills the input `Tensor` with values according to the method
described in `Delving deep into rectifiers: Surpassing human-level
performance on ImageNet classification` - He, K. et al. (2015), using a
uniform distribution. The resulting tensor will have values sampled from
:math:`\mathcal{U}(-\text{bound}, \text{bound})` where
.. math::
\text{bound} = \sqrt{\frac{6}{(1 + a^2) \times \text{fan\_in}}}
Also known as He initialization.
Args:
tensor: an n-dimensional `torch.Tensor`
a: the negative slope of the rectifier used after this layer (0 for ReLU
by default)
mode: either ``'fan_in'`` (default) or ``'fan_out'``. Choosing ``'fan_in'``
preserves the magnitude of the variance of the weights in the
forward pass. Choosing ``'fan_out'`` preserves the magnitudes in the
backwards pass.
nonlinearity: the non-linear function (`nn.functional` name),
recommended to use only with ``'relu'`` or ``'leaky_relu'`` (default).
Examples:
>>> w = torch.empty(3, 5)
>>> nn.init.kaiming_uniform_(w, mode='fan_in', nonlinearity='relu')
"""
fan = _calculate_correct_fan(tensor, mode)
gain = calculate_gain(nonlinearity, a)
std = gain / math.sqrt(fan)
bound = math.sqrt(3.0) * std # Calculate uniform bounds from standard deviation
with torch.no_grad():
return tensor.uniform_(-bound, bound)
Looking in the calculate_gain function, we can confirm that the resulting gain is different for leaky relu vs other types of activations (including no activation):
def calculate_gain(nonlinearity, param=None):
r"""Return the recommended gain value for the given nonlinearity function.
The values are as follows:
================= ====================================================
nonlinearity gain
================= ====================================================
Linear / Identity :math:`1`
Conv{1,2,3}D :math:`1`
Sigmoid :math:`1`
Tanh :math:`\frac{5}{3}`
ReLU :math:`\sqrt{2}`
Leaky Relu :math:`\sqrt{\frac{2}{1 + \text{negative\_slope}^2}}`
================= ====================================================\
Args:
nonlinearity: the non-linear function (`nn.functional` name)
param: optional parameter for the non-linear function
Examples:
>>> gain = nn.init.calculate_gain('leaky_relu')
"""
Is this desired behaviour? Wouldn’t a more appropriate default activation be linear / identity?