Neural network: does bias equal to zero, is the same as, a layer without bias?

Question

Question as in the title. Does bias equal to zero, is the same as, removing bias from the layer? Here's a pytorch implementation to showcase what I mean.

class MLP_without_bias(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()  

        # Bias set as False
        self.linear = torch.nn.Linear(5, 3, bias = False)

        # Xavier initialization 
        torch.nn.init.xavier_uniform_(self.linear.weight)

    def forward(self, x):
        return self.linear(x)

class MLP_with_bias_zero(torch.nn.Module):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()  

        # Default bias set as True
        self.linear = torch.nn.Linear(5, 3)

        # Xavier initialization 
        torch.nn.init.xavier_uniform_(self.linear.weight)

        # Bias initialized as zero
        torch.nn.init.zeros_(self.linear.bias)     

    def forward(self, x):
        return self.linear(x)

Answer 1

No, they are not the same:

• In MLP_without_bias the bias will be zero after training, because of bias=False.

• In MLP_with_bias_zero the bias is zero at initialization, but this will not prevent it from being updated during training.