For our first academic paper reading as a group, we chose The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks by Frankle et al. We chose this paper to try and make a smooth transition from neural networks textbook to academic readings. The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis shows that neural networks often contain small subnetworks (“lottery tickets”) that can be trained to match the accuracy of the larger, original network. They devise a method for locating these small subnetworks, and show that they exist for a variety of architectures with all different combinations of activation functions, dropout, normalizations, etc.