English

Robustness in deep learning: The good (width), the bad (depth), and the ugly (initialization)

Machine Learning 2023-02-13 v4 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We study the average robustness notion in deep neural networks in (selected) wide and narrow, deep and shallow, as well as lazy and non-lazy training settings. We prove that in the under-parameterized setting, width has a negative effect while it improves robustness in the over-parameterized setting. The effect of depth closely depends on the initialization and the training mode. In particular, when initialized with LeCun initialization, depth helps robustness with the lazy training regime. In contrast, when initialized with Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) and He-initialization, depth hurts the robustness. Moreover, under the non-lazy training regime, we demonstrate how the width of a two-layer ReLU network benefits robustness. Our theoretical developments improve the results by [Huang et al. NeurIPS21; Wu et al. NeurIPS21] and are consistent with [Bubeck and Sellke NeurIPS21; Bubeck et al. COLT21].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.07263,
  title  = {Robustness in deep learning: The good (width), the bad (depth), and the ugly (initialization)},
  author = {Zhenyu Zhu and Fanghui Liu and Grigorios G Chrysos and Volkan Cevher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.07263},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Accepted in NeurIPS 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-28T01:21:40.156Z