The success of lottery ticket initializations (Frankle and Carbin, 2019) suggests that small, sparsified networks can be trained so long as the network is initialized appropriately. Unfortunately, finding these winning ticket'' initializations is computationally expensive. One potential solution is to reuse the same winning tickets across a variety of datasets and optimizers. However, the generality of winning ticket initializations remains unclear. Here, we attempt to answer this question by generating winning tickets for one training configuration (optimizer and dataset) and evaluating their performance on another configuration. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that, within the natural images domain, winning ticket initializations generalized across a variety of datasets, including Fashion MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and Places365, often achieving performance close to that of winning tickets generated on the same dataset. Moreover, winning tickets generated using larger datasets consistently transferred better than those generated using smaller datasets. We also found that winning ticket initializations generalize across optimizers with high performance. These results suggest that winning ticket initializations generated by sufficiently large datasets contain inductive biases generic to neural networks more broadly which improve training across many settings and provide hope for the development of better initialization methods.

Unfortunately, finding these "winning ticket" initializations is computationally expensive.

Unfortunately, finding these "winning ticket" initializations is computationally expensive.

The success of lottery ticket initializations (Frankle and Carbin, 2019) suggests that small, sparsified networks can be trained so long as the network is initialized appropriately. Unfortunately, finding these "winning ticket" initializations is computationally expensive. One potential solution is to reuse the same winning tickets across a variety of datasets and optimizers. However, the generality of winning ticket initializations remains unclear. Here, we attempt to answer this question by generating winning tickets for one training configuration (optimizer and dataset) and evaluating their performance on another configuration. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that, within the natural images domain, winning ticket initializations generalized across a variety of datasets, including Fashion MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10/100, ImageNet, and Places365, often achieving performance close to that of winning tickets generated on the same dataset. Moreover, winning tickets generated using larger datasets consistently transferred better than those generated using smaller datasets. We also found that winning ticket initializations generalize across optimizers with high performance. These results suggest that winning ticket initializations contain inductive biases generic to neural networks more broadly which improve training across many settings and provide hope for the development of better initialization methods.

The lottery ticket hypothesis proposes that over-parameterization of deep neural networks (DNNs) aids training by increasing the probability of a "lucky" subnetwork initialization being present rather than by helping the optimization process [8]. This phenomenon is intriguing and suggests that initialization strategies for DNNs can be improved substantially, but the lottery ticket hypothesis has only previously been tested in the context of supervised learning for natural image tasks. Here, we evaluate whether "winning ticket" initializations exist in two different domains: reinforcement learning (RL) and in natural language processing (NLP). For RL, we analyzed a number of discrete-action space tasks, including both classic control and pixel control. For NLP, we examined both recurrent LSTM models and large-scale Transformer models [30]. Consistent with work in supervised image classification, we confirm that winning ticket initializations generally outperform parameter-matched random initializations, even at extreme pruning rates. Together, these results suggest that the lottery ticket hypothesis is not restricted to supervised learning of natural images, but rather represents a broader phenomenon in DNNs.