English

$\alpha$-Stable convergence of heavy-tailed infinitely-wide neural networks

Machine Learning 2021-06-22 v1 Machine Learning Probability

Abstract

We consider infinitely-wide multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) which are limits of standard deep feed-forward neural networks. We assume that, for each layer, the weights of an MLP are initialized with i.i.d. samples from either a light-tailed (finite variance) or heavy-tailed distribution in the domain of attraction of a symmetric α\alpha-stable distribution, where α(0,2]\alpha\in(0,2] may depend on the layer. For the bias terms of the layer, we assume i.i.d. initializations with a symmetric α\alpha-stable distribution having the same α\alpha parameter of that layer. We then extend a recent result of Favaro, Fortini, and Peluchetti (2020), to show that the vector of pre-activation values at all nodes of a given hidden layer converges in the limit, under a suitable scaling, to a vector of i.i.d. random variables with symmetric α\alpha-stable distributions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2106.11064,
  title  = {$\alpha$-Stable convergence of heavy-tailed infinitely-wide neural networks},
  author = {Paul Jung and Hoil Lee and Jiho Lee and Hongseok Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.11064},
  year   = {2021}
}