Related papers: On Connected Sublevel Sets in Deep Learning
It is shown that for deep neural networks, a single wide layer of width $N+1$ ($N$ being the number of training samples) suffices to prove the connectivity of sublevel sets of the training loss function. In the two-layer setting, the same…
We identify a class of over-parameterized deep neural networks with standard activation functions and cross-entropy loss which provably have no bad local valley, in the sense that from any point in parameter space there exists a continuous…
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…
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…
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…
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 explore some mathematical features of the loss landscape of overparameterized neural networks. A priori one might imagine that the loss function looks like a typical function from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}$ - in particular,…
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…
The residual network is now one of the most effective structures in deep learning, which utilizes the skip connections to ``guarantee" the performance will not get worse. However, the non-convexity of the neural network makes it unclear…
The question of how and why the phenomenon of mode connectivity occurs in training deep neural networks has gained remarkable attention in the research community. From a theoretical perspective, two possible explanations have been proposed:…
In deep learning, dense layer connectivity has become a key design principle in deep neural networks (DNNs), enabling efficient information flow and strong performance across a range of applications. In this work, we model densely connected…
The aim of this paper is to improve the understanding of the optimization landscape for policy optimization problems in reinforcement learning. Specifically, we show that the superlevel set of the objective function with respect to the…
Does over-parameterization eliminate sub-optimal local minima for neural networks? An affirmative answer was given by a classical result in [59] for 1-hidden-layer wide neural networks. A few recent works have extended the setting to…
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…
The loss function is arguably among the most important hyperparameters for a neural network. Many loss functions have been designed to date, making a correct choice nontrivial. However, elaborate justifications regarding the choice of the…
Recent Progress has shown that exploitation of hidden layer neurons in convolution neural networks incorporating with a carefully designed activation function can yield better classification results in the field of computer vision. The…
Giving provable guarantees for learning neural networks is a core challenge of machine learning theory. Most prior work gives parameter recovery guarantees for one hidden layer networks, however, the networks used in practice have multiple…
We draw connections between simple neural networks and under-determined linear systems to comprehensively explore several interesting theoretical questions in the study of neural networks. First, we emphatically show that it is unsurprising…
We study the loss surface of a feed-forward neural network with ReLU non-linearities, regularized with weight decay. We show that the regularized loss function is piecewise strongly convex on an important open set which contains, under some…
The loss surface of deep neural networks has recently attracted interest in the optimization and machine learning communities as a prime example of high-dimensional non-convex problem. Some insights were recently gained using spin glass…