Motivation for resnets

[avnish]

Professor Andy discussed the logic behind resnets. Specifically, he discussed the idea of “identity function”. I did not follow the argument.

Is there another way to look at this ?

[jonaslalin]

I wrote about identity mappings in another post:

W2 Test Question 5

From the original ResNet Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition: This reformulation is motivated by the counterintuitive phenomena about the degradation problem (Fig. 1, left). As we discussed in the introduction, if the added layers can be constructed as identity mappings, a deeper model should have training error no greater than its shallower counterpart. The degradation problem suggests that the solvers might have difficulties in approximating identity mappings by multiple nonlinear l…