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Training deep neural networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) can often achieve zero training loss on real-world tasks although the optimization landscape is known to be highly non-convex. To understand the success of SGD for…
Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In…
Training Deep Neural Networks relies on the model converging on a high-dimensional, non-convex loss landscape toward a good minimum. Yet, much of the phenomenology of training remains ill understood. We focus on three seemingly disparate…
Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…
Sparse neural networks have received increasing interest due to their small size compared to dense networks. Nevertheless, most existing works on neural network theory have focused on dense neural networks, and the understanding of sparse…
Recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding deep neural networks from an optimization perspective. It is understood now that converging to low-cost local minima is sufficient for such models to become effective in practice.…
A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…
Matrix sensing problems exhibit pervasive non-convexity, plaguing optimization with a proliferation of suboptimal spurious solutions. Avoiding convergence to these critical points poses a major challenge. This work provides new theoretical…
The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…
This paper investigates how the compositional structure of neural networks shapes their optimization landscape and training dynamics. We analyze the gradient flow associated with overparameterized optimization problems, which can be…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…
We consider the dynamics of gradient descent (GD) in overparameterized single hidden layer neural networks with a squared loss function. Recently, it has been shown that, under some conditions, the parameter values obtained using GD achieve…
We analyze the optimization landscapes of deep learning with wide networks. We highlight the importance of constraints for such networks and show that constraint -- as well as unconstraint -- empirical-risk minimization over such networks…
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…
We consider the approximation of functions by 2-layer neural networks with a small number of hidden weights based on the squared loss and small datasets. Due to the highly non-convex energy landscape, gradient-based training often suffers…
A main puzzle of deep neural networks (DNNs) revolves around the apparent absence of "overfitting", defined in this paper as follows: the expected error does not get worse when increasing the number of neurons or of iterations of gradient…
Despite the fact that the loss functions of deep neural networks are highly non-convex, gradient-based optimization algorithms converge to approximately the same performance from many random initial points. One thread of work has focused on…
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…
In this paper, we develop a new optimization framework for the least squares learning problem via fully connected neural networks or physics-informed neural networks. The gradient descent sometimes behaves inefficiently in deep learning…