Xavier weight filler question

[indie....@gmail.com]

I was looking up a GoogLeNet implementation in Caffe and I was looking at the deploy proto file.

I am confused about the Xavier weight filler option. In the above linked file, there is a "std" option for Xavier weights. What exactly is the effect of this std option for the Xavier weight filler?

[Mladen Fernežir]

Bump for this question. Isn't the std option used only for Gaussian fillers?

[Jan C Peters]

That really is curious. From the code (see https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/blob/master/include/caffe/filler.hpp#L144) I can guarantee that for Xavier initialization the "std" param is not used. Still, it is present in the linked prototxt. Maybe it is just a relict, someone changed the initialization from Gaussian to Xavier and forgot to delete the "std". Or leave it there just as a reference. It does not hurt anyway.

Jan

[Emmanuel Benazera]

Yes, std is not used. My understanding is that it is left in place so that switching from xavier to gaussian is easier.

Em.