Related papers: Which Neural Net Architectures Give Rise To Explod…
Deep neural networks are known to suffer from exploding or vanishing gradients as depth increases, a phenomenon closely tied to the spectral behavior of the input-output Jacobian. Prior work has identified critical initialization schemes…
We study the gradients of a maxout network with respect to inputs and parameters and obtain bounds for the moments depending on the architecture and the parameter distribution. We observe that the distribution of the input-output Jacobian…
Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) frequently exhibit complicated dynamics, and their sensitivity to the initialization process often renders them notoriously hard to train. Recent works have shed light on such phenomena analyzing when…
One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…
Natural gradient descent has proven effective at mitigating the effects of pathological curvature in neural network optimization, but little is known theoretically about its convergence properties, especially for \emph{nonlinear} networks.…
We study randomly initialized residual networks using mean field theory and the theory of difference equations. Classical feedforward neural networks, such as those with tanh activations, exhibit exponential behavior on the average when…
We provide a theoretical explanation of the role of the number of nodes at each layer in deep neural networks. We prove that the largest variation of a deep neural network with ReLU activation function arises when the layer with the fewest…
This paper revisits the so-called vanishing gradient phenomenon, which commonly occurs in deep randomly initialized neural networks. Leveraging an in-depth analysis of neural chains, we first show that vanishing gradients cannot be…
The ResNet architecture has been widely adopted in deep learning due to its significant boost to performance through the use of simple skip connections, yet the underlying mechanisms leading to its success remain largely unknown. In this…
We study the problem of learning one-hidden-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function, where the inputs are sampled from standard Gaussian distribution and the outputs are generated from a noisy teacher…
Despite remarkable performance on a variety of tasks, many properties of deep neural networks are not yet theoretically understood. One such mystery is the depth degeneracy phenomenon: the deeper you make your network, the closer your…
We investigate gradient descent training of wide neural networks and the corresponding implicit bias in function space. For univariate regression, we show that the solution of training a width-$n$ shallow ReLU network is within $n^{- 1/2}$…
Deep neural networks are highly expressive machine learning models with the ability to interpolate arbitrary datasets. Deep nets are typically optimized via first-order methods and the optimization process crucially depends on the…
Despite a great deal of research, it is still unclear why neural networks are so susceptible to adversarial examples. In this work, we identify natural settings where depth-$2$ ReLU networks trained with gradient flow are provably…
This article considers fully connected neural networks with Gaussian random weights and biases as well as $L$ hidden layers, each of width proportional to a large parameter $n$. For polynomially bounded non-linearities we give sharp…
We study the least-square regression problem with a two-layer fully-connected neural network, with ReLU activation function, trained by gradient flow. Our first result is a generalization result, that requires no assumptions on the…
Unitary recurrent neural networks (URNNs) have been proposed as a method to overcome the vanishing and exploding gradient problem in modeling data with long-term dependencies. A basic question is how restrictive is the unitary constraint on…
The training of neural networks by gradient descent methods is a cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. Yet, despite some recent progress, a complete theory explaining its success is still missing. This article presents, for…
Among many mysteries behind the success of deep networks lies the exceptional discriminative power of their learned representations as manifested by the intriguing Neural Collapse (NC) phenomenon, where simple feature structures emerge at…
We prove the precise scaling, at finite depth and width, for the mean and variance of the neural tangent kernel (NTK) in a randomly initialized ReLU network. The standard deviation is exponential in the ratio of network depth to width.…