Despite the widespread use of gradient-based algorithms for optimizing high-dimensional non-convex functions, understanding their ability of finding good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones remains to a large extent an open problem. Here we focus on gradient flow dynamics for phase retrieval from random measurements. When the ratio of the number of measurements over the input dimension is small the dynamics remains trapped in spurious minima with large basins of attraction. We find analytically that above a critical ratio those critical points become unstable developing a negative direction toward the signal. By numerical experiments we show that in this regime the gradient flow algorithm is not trapped; it drifts away from the spurious critical points along the unstable direction and succeeds in finding the global minimum. Using tools from statistical physics we characterize this phenomenon, which is related to a BBP-type transition in the Hessian of the spurious minima.
Gradient-based algorithms are effective for many machine learning tasks, but despite ample recent effort and some progress, it often remains unclear why they work in practice in optimising high-dimensional non-convex functions and why they find good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones. Here we present a quantitative theory explaining this behaviour in a spiked matrix-tensor model. Our framework is based on the Kac-Rice analysis of stationary points and a closed-form analysis of gradient-flow originating from statistical physics. We show that there is a well defined region of parameters where the gradient-flow algorithm finds a good global minimum despite the presence of exponentially many spurious local minima. We show that this is achieved by surfing on saddles that have strong negative direction towards the global minima, a phenomenon that is connected to a BBP-type threshold in the Hessian describing the critical points of the landscapes.
In this paper we investigate the family of functions representable by deep neural networks (DNN) with rectified linear units (ReLU). We give an algorithm to train a ReLU DNN with one hidden layer to *global optimality* with runtime polynomial in the data size albeit exponential in the input dimension. Further, we improve on the known lower bounds on size (from exponential to super exponential) for approximating a ReLU deep net function by a shallower ReLU net. Our gap theorems hold for smoothly parametrized families of hard functions, contrary to countable, discrete families known in the literature. An example consequence of our gap theorems is the following: for every natural number $k$ there exists a function representable by a ReLU DNN with $k^2$ hidden layers and total size $k^3$, such that any ReLU DNN with at most $k$ hidden layers will require at least $frac{1}{2}k^{k+1}-1$ total nodes. Finally, for the family of $mathbb{R}^nto mathbb{R}$ DNNs with ReLU activations, we show a new lowerbound on the number of affine pieces, which is larger than previous constructions in certain regimes of the network architecture and most distinctively our lowerbound is demonstrated by an explicit construction of a *smoothly parameterized* family of functions attaining this scaling. Our construction utilizes the theory of zonotopes from polyhedral theory.
A condensation transition was predicted for growing technological networks evolving by preferential attachment and competing quality of their nodes, as described by the fitness model. When this condensation occurs a node acquires a finite fraction of all the links of the network. Earlier studies based on steady state degree distribution and on the mapping to Bose-Einstein condensation, were able to identify the critical point. Here we characterize the dynamics of condensation and we present evidence that below the condensation temperature there is a slow down of the dynamics and that a single node (not necessarily the best node in the network) emerges as the winner for very long times. The characteristic time t* at which this phenomenon occurs diverges both at the critical point and at $T -> 0$ when new links are attached deterministically to the highest quality node of the network.
Sparse Neural Networks (NNs) can match the generalization of dense NNs using a fraction of the compute/storage for inference, and also have the potential to enable efficient training. However, naively training unstructured sparse NNs from random initialization results in significantly worse generalization, with the notable exception of Lottery Tickets (LTs) and Dynamic Sparse Training (DST). In this work, we attempt to answer: (1) why training unstructured sparse networks from random initialization performs poorly and; (2) what makes LTs and DST the exceptions? We show that sparse NNs have poor gradient flow at initialization and propose a modified initialization for unstructured connectivity. Furthermore, we find that DST methods significantly improve gradient flow during training over traditional sparse training methods. Finally, we show that LTs do not improve gradient flow, rather their success lies in re-learning the pruning solution they are derived from - however, this comes at the cost of learning novel solutions.
Gradient descent yields zero training loss in polynomial time for deep neural networks despite non-convex nature of the objective function. The behavior of network in the infinite width limit trained by gradient descent can be described by the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) introduced in cite{Jacot2018Neural}. In this paper, we study dynamics of the NTK for finite width Deep Residual Network (ResNet) using the neural tangent hierarchy (NTH) proposed in cite{Huang2019Dynamics}. For a ResNet with smooth and Lipschitz activation function, we reduce the requirement on the layer width $m$ with respect to the number of training samples $n$ from quartic to cubic. Our analysis suggests strongly that the particular skip-connection structure of ResNet is the main reason for its triumph over fully-connected network.