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We consider solving the low rank matrix sensing problem with Factorized Gradient Descend (FGD) method when the true rank is unknown and over-specified, which we refer to as over-parameterized matrix sensing. If the ground truth signal $mathbf{X}^* in mathbb{R}^{d*d}$ is of rank $r$, but we try to recover it using $mathbf{F} mathbf{F}^top$ where $mathbf{F} in mathbb{R}^{d*k}$ and $k>r$, the existing statistical analysis falls short, due to a flat local curvature of the loss function around the global maxima. By decomposing the factorized matrix $mathbf{F}$ into separate column spaces to capture the effect of extra ranks, we show that $|mathbf{F}_t mathbf{F}_t - mathbf{X}^*|_{F}^2$ converges to a statistical error of $tilde{mathcal{O}} ({k d sigma^2/n})$ after $tilde{mathcal{O}}(frac{sigma_{r}}{sigma}sqrt{frac{n}{d}})$ number of iterations where $mathbf{F}_t$ is the output of FGD after $t$ iterations, $sigma^2$ is the variance of the observation noise, $sigma_{r}$ is the $r$-th largest eigenvalue of $mathbf{X}^*$, and $n$ is the number of sample. Our results, therefore, offer a comprehensive picture of the statistical and computational complexity of FGD for the over-parameterized matrix sensing problem.
We consider whether algorithmic choices in over-parameterized linear matrix factorization introduce implicit regularization. We focus on noiseless matrix sensing over rank-$r$ positive semi-definite (PSD) matrices in $mathbb{R}^{n times n}$, with a sensing mechanism that satisfies restricted isometry properties (RIP). The algorithm we study is emph{factored gradient descent}, where we model the low-rankness and PSD constraints with the factorization $UU^top$, for $U in mathbb{R}^{n times r}$. Surprisingly, recent work argues that the choice of $r leq n$ is not pivotal: even setting $U in mathbb{R}^{n times n}$ is sufficient for factored gradient descent to find the rank-$r$ solution, which suggests that operating over the factors leads to an implicit regularization. In this contribution, we provide a different perspective to the problem of implicit regularization. We show that under certain conditions, the PSD constraint by itself is sufficient to lead to a unique rank-$r$ matrix recovery, without implicit or explicit low-rank regularization. emph{I.e.}, under assumptions, the set of PSD matrices, that are consistent with the observed data, is a singleton, regardless of the algorithm used.
We consider training over-parameterized two-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) using gradient descent (GD) method. Inspired by a recent line of work, we study the evolutions of network prediction errors across GD iterations, which can be neatly described in a matrix form. When the network is sufficiently over-parameterized, these matrices individually approximate {em an} integral operator which is determined by the feature vector distribution $rho$ only. Consequently, GD method can be viewed as {em approximately} applying the powers of this integral operator on the underlying/target function $f^*$ that generates the responses/labels. We show that if $f^*$ admits a low-rank approximation with respect to the eigenspaces of this integral operator, then the empirical risk decreases to this low-rank approximation error at a linear rate which is determined by $f^*$ and $rho$ only, i.e., the rate is independent of the sample size $n$. Furthermore, if $f^*$ has zero low-rank approximation error, then, as long as the width of the neural network is $Omega(nlog n)$, the empirical risk decreases to $Theta(1/sqrt{n})$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result showing the sufficiency of nearly-linear network over-parameterization. We provide an application of our general results to the setting where $rho$ is the uniform distribution on the spheres and $f^*$ is a polynomial. Throughout this paper, we consider the scenario where the input dimension $d$ is fixed.
Adversarial training is a popular method to give neural nets robustness against adversarial perturbations. In practice adversarial training leads to low robust training loss. However, a rigorous explanation for why this happens under natural conditions is still missing. Recently a convergence theory for standard (non-adversarial) supervised training was developed by various groups for {em very overparametrized} nets. It is unclear how to extend these results to adversarial training because of the min-max objective. Recently, a first step towards this direction was made by Gao et al. using tools from online learning, but they require the width of the net to be emph{exponential} in input dimension $d$, and with an unnatural activation function. Our work proves convergence to low robust training loss for emph{polynomial} width instead of exponential, under natural assumptions and with the ReLU activation. Key element of our proof is showing that ReLU networks near initialization can approximate the step function, which may be of independent interest.
Nesterov SGD is widely used for training modern neural networks and other machine learning models. Yet, its advantages over SGD have not been theoretically clarified. Indeed, as we show in our paper, both theoretically and empirically, Nesterov SGD with any parameter selection does not in general provide acceleration over ordinary SGD. Furthermore, Nesterov SGD may diverge for step sizes that ensure convergence of ordinary SGD. This is in contrast to the classical results in the deterministic scenario, where the same step size ensures accelerated convergence of the Nesterovs method over optimal gradient descent. To address the non-acceleration issue, we introduce a compensation term to Nesterov SGD. The resulting algorithm, which we call MaSS, converges for same step sizes as SGD. We prove that MaSS obtains an accelerated convergence rates over SGD for any mini-batch size in the linear setting. For full batch, the convergence rate of MaSS matches the well-known accelerated rate of the Nesterovs method. We also analyze the practically important question of the dependence of the convergence rate and optimal hyper-parameters on the mini-batch size, demonstrating three distinct regimes: linear scaling, diminishing returns and saturation. Experimental evaluation of MaSS for several standard architectures of deep networks, including ResNet and convolutional networks, shows improved performance over SGD, Nesterov SGD and Adam.
The inductive bias of a neural network is largely determined by the architecture and the training algorithm. To achieve good generalization, how to effectively train a neural network is of great importance. We propose a novel orthogonal over-parameterized training (OPT) framework that can provably minimize the hyperspherical energy which characterizes the diversity of neurons on a hypersphere. By maintaining the minimum hyperspherical energy during training, OPT can greatly improve the empirical generalization. Specifically, OPT fixes the randomly initialized weights of the neurons and learns an orthogonal transformation that applies to these neurons. We consider multiple ways to learn such an orthogonal transformation, including unrolling orthogonalization algorithms, applying orthogonal parameterization, and designing orthogonality-preserving gradient descent. For better scalability, we propose the stochastic OPT which performs orthogonal transformation stochastically for partial dimensions of neurons. Interestingly, OPT reveals that learning a proper coordinate system for neurons is crucial to generalization. We provide some insights on why OPT yields better generalization. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of OPT over the standard training.