Properties of the geometry of solutions and capacity of multi-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Units activations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Baldassi, Carlo, Malatesta, Enrico M., Zecchina, Riccardo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
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author Baldassi, Carlo
Malatesta, Enrico M.
Zecchina, Riccardo
author_facet Baldassi, Carlo
Malatesta, Enrico M.
Zecchina, Riccardo
contents Rectified Linear Units (ReLU) have become the main model for the neural units in current deep learning systems. This choice has been originally suggested as a way to compensate for the so called vanishing gradient problem which can undercut stochastic gradient descent (SGD) learning in networks composed of multiple layers. Here we provide analytical results on the effects of ReLUs on the capacity and on the geometrical landscape of the solution space in two-layer neural networks with either binary or real-valued weights. We study the problem of storing an extensive number of random patterns and find that, quite unexpectedly, the capacity of the network remains finite as the number of neurons in the hidden layer increases, at odds with the case of threshold units in which the capacity diverges. Possibly more important, a large deviation approach allows us to find that the geometrical landscape of the solution space has a peculiar structure: while the majority of solutions are close in distance but still isolated, there exist rare regions of solutions which are much more dense than the similar ones in the case of threshold units. These solutions are robust to perturbations of the weights and can tolerate large perturbations of the inputs. The analytical results are corroborated by numerical findings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1907_07578
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Properties of the geometry of solutions and capacity of multi-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Units activations
Baldassi, Carlo
Malatesta, Enrico M.
Zecchina, Riccardo
Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Machine Learning
Rectified Linear Units (ReLU) have become the main model for the neural units in current deep learning systems. This choice has been originally suggested as a way to compensate for the so called vanishing gradient problem which can undercut stochastic gradient descent (SGD) learning in networks composed of multiple layers. Here we provide analytical results on the effects of ReLUs on the capacity and on the geometrical landscape of the solution space in two-layer neural networks with either binary or real-valued weights. We study the problem of storing an extensive number of random patterns and find that, quite unexpectedly, the capacity of the network remains finite as the number of neurons in the hidden layer increases, at odds with the case of threshold units in which the capacity diverges. Possibly more important, a large deviation approach allows us to find that the geometrical landscape of the solution space has a peculiar structure: while the majority of solutions are close in distance but still isolated, there exist rare regions of solutions which are much more dense than the similar ones in the case of threshold units. These solutions are robust to perturbations of the weights and can tolerate large perturbations of the inputs. The analytical results are corroborated by numerical findings.
title Properties of the geometry of solutions and capacity of multi-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Units activations
topic Disordered Systems and Neural Networks
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.07578