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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…
In this paper, we study the loss landscape of one-hidden-layer neural networks with ReLU-like activation functions trained with the empirical squared loss using gradient descent (GD). We identify the stationary points of such networks,…
We study the effects of mild over-parameterization on the optimization landscape of a simple ReLU neural network of the form $\mathbf{x}\mapsto\sum_{i=1}^k\max\{0,\mathbf{w}_i^{\top}\mathbf{x}\}$, in a well-studied teacher-student setting…
Neural networks often operate in the overparameterized regime, in which there are far more parameters than training samples, allowing the training data to be fit perfectly. That is, training the network effectively learns an interpolating…
Despite their practical success, a theoretical understanding of the loss landscape of neural networks has proven challenging due to the high-dimensional, non-convex, and highly nonlinear structure of such models. In this paper, we…
The successful training of neural networks hinges on the use of first order optimization methods, yet the theoretical characterization of these methods remains incomplete. This is especially true in settings with mild overparameterization.…
We study the loss landscape of both shallow and deep, mildly overparameterized ReLU neural networks on a generic finite input dataset for the squared error loss. We show both by count and volume that most activation patterns correspond to…
Recent theoretical works on over-parameterized neural nets have focused on two aspects: optimization and generalization. Many existing works that study optimization and generalization together are based on neural tangent kernel and require…
Implicit neural networks have become increasingly attractive in the machine learning community since they can achieve competitive performance but use much less computational resources. Recently, a line of theoretical works established the…
Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus a…
The analysis of neural network training beyond their linearization regime remains an outstanding open question, even in the simplest setup of a single hidden-layer. The limit of infinitely wide networks provides an appealing route forward…
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…
It is well-known that overparametrized neural networks trained using gradient-based methods quickly achieve small training error with appropriate hyperparameter settings. Recent papers have proved this statement theoretically for highly…
We propose and analyze a new family of algorithms for training neural networks with ReLU activations. Our algorithms are based on the technique of alternating minimization: estimating the activation patterns of each ReLU for all given…
Many modern neural network architectures are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Sufficiently overparameterized neural network architectures in principle have the…
In this paper, we analyze the landscape of the true loss of neural networks with one hidden layer and ReLU, leaky ReLU, or quadratic activation. In all three cases, we provide a complete classification of the critical points in the case…
With the motive of training all the parameters of a neural network, we study why and when one can achieve this by iteratively creating, training, and combining randomly selected subnetworks. Such scenarios have either implicitly or…
Recently, a spate of papers have provided positive theoretical results for training over-parameterized neural networks (where the network size is larger than what is needed to achieve low error). The key insight is that with sufficient…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
It is shown that over-parameterized neural networks can achieve minimax optimal rates of convergence (up to logarithmic factors) for learning functions from certain smooth function classes, if the weights are suitably constrained or…