# Custom Gradient Estimators are Straight-Through Estimators in Disguise Source: [Custom Gradient Estimators are Straight-Through Estimators in Disguise]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-26T02:45:17.730Z Authors: Matt Schoenbauer, Daniele Moro, Lukasz Lew, Andrew Howard Published: 2024-05-08T16:07:56.000Z ## Abstract Quantization-aware training comes with a fundamental challenge: the derivative of quantization functions such as rounding are zero almost everywhere and nonexistent elsewhere. Various differentiable approximations of quantization functions have been proposed to address this issue. In this paper, we prove that when the learning rate is sufficiently small, a large class of weight gradient estimators is equivalent with the straight through estimator (STE). Specifically, after swapping in the STE and adjusting both the weight initialization and the learning rate in SGD, the model will train in almost exactly the same way as it did with the original gradient estimator. Moreover, we show that for adaptive learning rate algorithms like Adam, the same result can be seen without any modifications to the weight initialization and learning rate. We experimentally show that these results hold for both a small convolutional model trained on the MNIST dataset and for a ResNet50 model trained on ImageNet. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()