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Infinite-width limit of deep linear neural networks

Machine Learning 2022-12-01 v1 Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper studies the infinite-width limit of deep linear neural networks initialized with random parameters. We obtain that, when the number of neurons diverges, the training dynamics converge (in a precise sense) to the dynamics obtained from a gradient descent on an infinitely wide deterministic linear neural network. Moreover, even if the weights remain random, we get their precise law along the training dynamics, and prove a quantitative convergence result of the linear predictor in terms of the number of neurons. We finally study the continuous-time limit obtained for infinitely wide linear neural networks and show that the linear predictors of the neural network converge at an exponential rate to the minimal 2\ell_2-norm minimizer of the risk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2211.16980,
  title  = {Infinite-width limit of deep linear neural networks},
  author = {Lénaïc Chizat and Maria Colombo and Xavier Fernández-Real and Alessio Figalli},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.16980},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:18:07.681Z