Differential Equation Scaling Limits of Shaped and Unshaped Neural Networks

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Mufan Bill, Nica, Mihai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909175104143360
author Li, Mufan Bill
Nica, Mihai
author_facet Li, Mufan Bill
Nica, Mihai
contents Recent analyses of neural networks with shaped activations (i.e. the activation function is scaled as the network size grows) have led to scaling limits described by differential equations. However, these results do not a priori tell us anything about "ordinary" unshaped networks, where the activation is unchanged as the network size grows. In this article, we find similar differential equation based asymptotic characterization for two types of unshaped networks. Firstly, we show that the following two architectures converge to the same infinite-depth-and-width limit at initialization: (i) a fully connected ResNet with a $d^{-1/2}$ factor on the residual branch, where $d$ is the network depth. (ii) a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with depth $d \ll$ width $n$ and shaped ReLU activation at rate $d^{-1/2}$. Secondly, for an unshaped MLP at initialization, we derive the first order asymptotic correction to the layerwise correlation. In particular, if $ρ_\ell$ is the correlation at layer $\ell$, then $q_t = \ell^2 (1 - ρ_\ell)$ with $t = \frac{\ell}{n}$ converges to an SDE with a singularity at $t=0$. These results together provide a connection between shaped and unshaped network architectures, and opens up the possibility of studying the effect of normalization methods and how it connects with shaping activation functions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_12079
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Differential Equation Scaling Limits of Shaped and Unshaped Neural Networks
Li, Mufan Bill
Nica, Mihai
Machine Learning
Recent analyses of neural networks with shaped activations (i.e. the activation function is scaled as the network size grows) have led to scaling limits described by differential equations. However, these results do not a priori tell us anything about "ordinary" unshaped networks, where the activation is unchanged as the network size grows. In this article, we find similar differential equation based asymptotic characterization for two types of unshaped networks. Firstly, we show that the following two architectures converge to the same infinite-depth-and-width limit at initialization: (i) a fully connected ResNet with a $d^{-1/2}$ factor on the residual branch, where $d$ is the network depth. (ii) a multilayer perceptron (MLP) with depth $d \ll$ width $n$ and shaped ReLU activation at rate $d^{-1/2}$. Secondly, for an unshaped MLP at initialization, we derive the first order asymptotic correction to the layerwise correlation. In particular, if $ρ_\ell$ is the correlation at layer $\ell$, then $q_t = \ell^2 (1 - ρ_\ell)$ with $t = \frac{\ell}{n}$ converges to an SDE with a singularity at $t=0$. These results together provide a connection between shaped and unshaped network architectures, and opens up the possibility of studying the effect of normalization methods and how it connects with shaping activation functions.
title Differential Equation Scaling Limits of Shaped and Unshaped Neural Networks
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.12079