The most cited paper of the century is a brilliant hack

Thank you to Jane Street for sponsoring this video: https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/internships/?utm_source=welchlabs26&utm_medium=youtube&utm_campaign=welch-labs Welch Labs Book: https://www.welchlabs.com/resources/ai-book-ezrzm-msrmc Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/welchlabs SECTIONS 0:00 - Intro 1:04 - When Deep Learning Stopped Working 3:17 - Tracing Data Forward 8:18 - The Degradation Problem 9:11 - Probing the Model 13:20 - Loss Landscapes 15:49 - Shattered Gradients 16:39 - Residual Networks 21:22 - Jane Street is a Fascinating Place to Work 23:45 - ResNets Force a New Understanding 25:16 - The Residual Stream 27:52 - Vision Transformers Need Registers 32:18 - AI & Scientific Progress 34:27 - Support Welch Labs on Patreon! NOTES Kaiming He declined to be interviewed for this video, Xiangyu Zhang, and Shaoqing Ren did not respond to our interview requests, and Jian Sun unfortunately passed away in 2022. Our reporting of the development of ResNet is based on close reading of the team’s papers and recorded talks. The original ResNet paper used slightly different skip connections (Pre ReLU) than presented here, the ResNet updated their approach in 2016, see “Identity mappings in deep residual networks.” The loss landscape approach taken here is from Li, Hao, et al. "Visualizing the loss landscape of neural nets." REFERENCES Hutson, Matthew, and Richard Van Noorden. "The most-cited papers of the twenty-first century." *Nature* 640 (2025): 589. Veit, Andreas, Michael J. Wilber, and Serge Belongie. "Residual networks behave like ensembles of relatively shallow networks." *Advances in neural information processing systems* 29 (2016). He, Kaiming, et al. "Delving deep into rectifiers: Surpassing human-level performance on imagenet classification." *Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision*. 2015. He, Kaiming, et al. "Deep residual learning for image recognition." *Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition*. 2016. (One more citation lol) He, Kaiming, et al. "Identity mappings in deep residual networks." *European conference on computer vision*. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016. Balduzzi, David, et al. "The shattered gradients problem: If resnets are the answer, then what is the question?." *International conference on machine learning*. PMLR, 2017. Li, Hao, et al. "Visualizing the loss landscape of neural nets." *Advances in neural information processing systems* 31 (2018). Darcet, Timothée, et al. "Vision transformers need registers." *International conference on learning representations*. Vol. 2024. 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6tLw-rPQ2o PATRONS Juan Benet, Yan Babitski, AJ Englehardt, Alvin Khaled, Eduardo Barraza, Hitoshi Yamauchi, Jaewon Jung, Mrgoodlight, Shinichi Hayashi, Sid Sarasvati, Dominic Beaumont, Shannon Prater, Ubiquity Ventures, Matias Forti, Brian Henry, Tim Palade, Petar Vecutin, Nicolas baumann, Jason Singh, Robert Riley, vornska, Barry Silverman, Jake Ehrlich, Mitch Jacobs, Lauren Steely, Jeff Eastman, Rodolfo Ibarra, Clark Barrus, Rob Napier, Andrew White, Richard B Johnston, abhiteja mandava, Burt Humburg, Kevin Mitchell, Daniel Sanchez, Ferdie Wang, Tripp Hill, Richard Harbaugh Jr, Prasad Raje, Kalle Aaltonen, Midori Switch Hound, Zach Wilson, Chris Seltzer, Ven Popov, Hunter Nelson, Amit Bueno, Scott Olsen, Johan Rimez, Shehryar Saroya, Tyler Christensen, Beckett Madden-Woods, Darrell Thomas, Javier Soto, U007D, Caleb Begly, Rick Rubenstein, Brent Hunsaker, Dan Patterson, Tchsurvives, Alex Adai, Walter Reade, Zyansheep, Walter Reade, Duncan Stannett, Reginald Carey, Jean-Manuel Izaret, dh71633, Adrian Rodriguez, Dimitar Stojanovski, Michael Harder, Peter Maldonado, Emily Pesce, David Johnston, Insang Song, FaeTheWolf, Stephen Taylor, KittenKaboodle, EMatter, PATRICKMCCORMACK, John Beahan, Cameron, Cole Jones, Garrett Thornburg, Jeroen W, Rohit Sharma, GlennB, Emmanuel Cortes, Katie Quinn, Karina C, Cakra WW, Mike Ton, Eric Gometz, MacCallister Higgins, Niko Drossos, David Eraso, Tom Zehle, Steve, Brian Lineburg, rjbl, Michael Loh, Perry Vais, Bengal0, Farhad Manjoo, Sara Chipps, Ellis Driscoll, William Taysom, Will Harmon, CK, Abdullah, Peter Cho, Leo Nikora, Griffin Smith, Ash Katnoria, Alex, Markus Hays Nielsen, Catherine H., Vi, David Dobáš, Peter Wang, Sina Sohangir, Danny Thomas, Julian Francis, Hans Adler, Jiayu Peng, Weston M, Youssouf da Silva, John Thomas, Samuel Costello, Sam Adams, Bryan Liles, Malaya Zemlya, Karl, Vahe Andonians, Mike Doughty, Larry Novelo, Jonas Acres, Ludicrum Rex, Robert Blumofe, Anthony Z, Alex Zhao, Dan Babitch, Nikko Patten, Sam Adams, Rahul Ravu, Marco Salvi, Ralph Dratman, Brendan Ardagh, Mindaugas Kazlauskas, Ui, John Posada, MingLLM | Yiming Beckmann, Eric Younge, Puyu He, KirkDCO, Hayk Tarkhanyan, Vincent Cosomano, Jazon Jiao Created by: Sam Baskin, Pranav Gundu, Matthew Cohen, and Stephen Welch Content ID: CFAQJOTYQHT7JYIT