Related papers: No bad local minima: Data independent training err…
Background: Statistical mechanics results (Dauphin et al. (2014); Choromanska et al. (2015)) suggest that local minima with high error are exponentially rare in high dimensions. However, to prove low error guarantees for Multilayer Neural…
We consider deep linear networks with arbitrary convex differentiable loss. We provide a short and elementary proof of the fact that all local minima are global minima if the hidden layers are either 1) at least as wide as the input layer,…
It is widely conjectured that the reason that training algorithms for neural networks are successful because all local minima lead to similar performance, for example, see (LeCun et al., 2015, Choromanska et al., 2015, Dauphin et al.,…
Supervised training of neural networks for classification is typically performed with a global loss function. The loss function provides a gradient for the output layer, and this gradient is back-propagated to hidden layers to dictate an…
While the optimization problem behind deep neural networks is highly non-convex, it is frequently observed in practice that training deep networks seems possible without getting stuck in suboptimal points. It has been argued that this is…
The existence of local minima for one-hidden-layer ReLU networks has been investigated theoretically in [8]. Based on the theory, in this paper, we first analyze how big the probability of existing local minima is for 1D Gaussian data and…
There has been a lot of recent interest in trying to characterize the error surface of deep models. This stems from a long standing question. Given that deep networks are highly nonlinear systems optimized by local gradient methods, why do…
We analyze multi-layer neural networks in the asymptotic regime of simultaneously (A) large network sizes and (B) large numbers of stochastic gradient descent training iterations. We rigorously establish the limiting behavior of the…
We investigate the loss surface of neural networks. We prove that even for one-hidden-layer networks with "slightest" nonlinearity, the empirical risks have spurious local minima in most cases. Our results thus indicate that in general "no…
Although deep learning has shown its powerful performance in many applications, the mathematical principles behind neural networks are still mysterious. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a one-hidden-layer neural network…
We analyze the loss landscape and expressiveness of practical deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with shared weights and max pooling layers. We show that such CNNs produce linearly independent features at a "wide" layer which has…
Neural networks are a powerful class of functions that can be trained with simple gradient descent to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of applications. Despite their practical success, there is a paucity of results that…
For one-hidden-layer ReLU networks, we prove that all differentiable local minima are global inside differentiable regions. We give the locations and losses of differentiable local minima, and show that these local minima can be isolated…
In this paper, we theoretically prove that adding one special neuron per output unit eliminates all suboptimal local minima of any deep neural network, for multi-class classification, binary classification, and regression with an arbitrary…
It is well known that (stochastic) gradient descent has an implicit bias towards flat minima. In deep neural network training, this mechanism serves to screen out minima. However, the precise effect that this has on the trained network is…
Training neural networks is a challenging non-convex optimization problem, and backpropagation or gradient descent can get stuck in spurious local optima. We propose a novel algorithm based on tensor decomposition for guaranteed training of…
We study the connection between the highly non-convex loss function of a simple model of the fully-connected feed-forward neural network and the Hamiltonian of the spherical spin-glass model under the assumptions of: i) variable…
Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…
We explore the potential for using a nonsmooth loss function based on the max-norm in the training of an artificial neural network. We hypothesise that this may lead to superior classification results in some special cases where the…
Understanding the loss surface of a neural network is fundamentally important to the understanding of deep learning. This paper presents how piecewise linear activation functions substantially shape the loss surfaces of neural networks. We…