Related papers: Depth Creates No Bad Local Minima
In this paper, we prove that depth with nonlinearity creates no bad local minima in a type of arbitrarily deep ResNets with arbitrary nonlinear activation functions, in the sense that the values of all local minima are no worse than the…
Understanding the loss surface of neural networks is essential for the design of models with predictable performance and their success in applications. Experimental results suggest that sufficiently deep and wide neural networks are not…
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…
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…
In this paper, we analyze the effects of depth and width on the quality of local minima, without strong over-parameterization and simplification assumptions in the literature. Without any simplification assumption, for deep nonlinear neural…
In this paper, we prove a conjecture published in 1989 and also partially address an open problem announced at the Conference on Learning Theory (COLT) 2015. With no unrealistic assumption, we first prove the following statements for 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…
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,…
We show that for any convex differentiable loss, a deep linear network has no spurious local minima as long as it is true for the two layer case. This reduction greatly simplifies the study on the existence of spurious local minima in deep…
We use smoothed analysis techniques to provide guarantees on the training loss of Multilayer Neural Networks (MNNs) at differentiable local minima. Specifically, we examine MNNs with piecewise linear activation functions, quadratic loss and…
For nonconvex optimization in machine learning, this article proves that every local minimum achieves the globally optimal value of the perturbable gradient basis model at any differentiable point. As a result, nonconvex machine learning is…
The success of deep learning has revealed the application potential of neural networks across the sciences and opened up fundamental theoretical problems. In particular, the fact that learning algorithms based on simple variants of gradient…
We study the error landscape of deep linear and nonlinear neural networks with the squared error loss. Minimizing the loss of a deep linear neural network is a nonconvex problem, and despite recent progress, our understanding of this loss…
In this paper, we theoretically prove that gradient descent can find a global minimum of non-convex optimization of all layers for nonlinear deep neural networks of sizes commonly encountered in practice. The theory developed in this paper…
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…
One of the main difficulties in analyzing neural networks is the non-convexity of the loss function which may have many bad local minima. In this paper, we study the landscape of neural networks for binary classification tasks. Under mild…
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…
This work characterizes the effect of depth on the optimization landscape of linear regression, showing that, despite their nonconvexity, deeper models have more desirable optimization landscape. We consider a robust and over-parameterized…
This work finds the analytical expression of the global minima of a deep linear network with weight decay and stochastic neurons, a fundamental model for understanding the landscape of neural networks. Our result implies that the origin is…
By using the viewpoint of modern computational algebraic geometry, we explore properties of the optimization landscapes of the deep linear neural network models. After clarifying on the various definitions of "flat" minima, we show that the…