[HighFreqAsuka]

Just read the section on ResNets (Section 1.5) and tell me if you think that's the best way to explain ResNets to literally anyone. Tell me if, from that description, you take away that the reason skip connections improve performance is that they improve gradient flow in very deep networks.

[p1esk]

the reason skip connections improve performance is that they improve gradient flow in very deep networks.

Can you prove this statement?

[c7b]

Neither do the authors in the book, and I'd argue that after (only) reading the book, the reader wouldn't be equipped to attempt this either (see my other post in this thread), so I think the parent poster has a point.

[HighFreqAsuka]

Empirically yes, I can consider a very deep fully-connected network, measure the gradients in each layer with and without skip connections, and compare. I can do this across multiple seeds and run a statistical test on the deltas.