2020

A Mean-field Analysis of Deep ResNet and Beyond: Towards Provable Optimization Via Overparameterization From Depth

Lu, Yiping, Ma, Chao, Lu, Yulong et al.

Understand

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 training deep neural networks, this work presents a mean-field analysis of deep residual networks, based on a line of works that interpret the continuum limit of the deep residual network as an ordinary differential equation when the network capacity tends to infinity.
  • Specifically, we propose a new continuum limit of deep residual networks, which enjoys a good landscape in the sense that every local minimizer is global.
  • This characterization enables us to derive the first global convergence result for multilayer neural networks in the mean-field regime.

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