Are you familiar with the edge popup algorithm introduced in "What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?" https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299v2 https://a

Are you familiar with the edge popup algorithm introduced in "What's Hidden in a Randomly Weighted Neural Network?" https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.13299v2 Seems relevant to what you're working on. It starts with a randomly initialized, overparameterized neural net, but instead of gradient descent backpropagation, it learns by deleting connection edges.