Lottery ticket hypothesis

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:05:43 +0000

Definition

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis suggests that within a large, randomly initialized neural network, there exists a sparse subnetwork (the ‘winning ticket’) that is well-initialized for training. By pruning weights iteratively and resetting the remaining ones to their initial values, this subnetwork can converge to high accuracy independently. This concept supports model compression and efficiency, challenging the necessity of training massive models from scratch for every task.

Summary

The theory that dense neural networks contain smaller subnetworks that, when trained in isolation from initialization, can match the accuracy of the original network.

Pruning on English AI Terms Dictionary

Lottery ticket hypothesis

Definition

Summary