Early alignment in two-layer networks training is a two-edged sword

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Boursier, Etienne, Flammarion, Nicolas
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
author_facet Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
contents Training neural networks with first order optimisation methods is at the core of the empirical success of deep learning. The scale of initialisation is a crucial factor, as small initialisations are generally associated to a feature learning regime, for which gradient descent is implicitly biased towards simple solutions. This work provides a general and quantitative description of the early alignment phase, originally introduced by Maennel et al. (2018). For small initialisation and one hidden ReLU layer networks, the early stage of the training dynamics leads to an alignment of the neurons towards key directions. This alignment induces a sparse representation of the network, which is directly related to the implicit bias of gradient flow at convergence. This sparsity inducing alignment however comes at the expense of difficulties in minimising the training objective: we also provide a simple data example for which overparameterised networks fail to converge towards global minima and only converge to a spurious stationary point instead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_10791
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Early alignment in two-layer networks training is a two-edged sword
Boursier, Etienne
Flammarion, Nicolas
Machine Learning
Training neural networks with first order optimisation methods is at the core of the empirical success of deep learning. The scale of initialisation is a crucial factor, as small initialisations are generally associated to a feature learning regime, for which gradient descent is implicitly biased towards simple solutions. This work provides a general and quantitative description of the early alignment phase, originally introduced by Maennel et al. (2018). For small initialisation and one hidden ReLU layer networks, the early stage of the training dynamics leads to an alignment of the neurons towards key directions. This alignment induces a sparse representation of the network, which is directly related to the implicit bias of gradient flow at convergence. This sparsity inducing alignment however comes at the expense of difficulties in minimising the training objective: we also provide a simple data example for which overparameterised networks fail to converge towards global minima and only converge to a spurious stationary point instead.
title Early alignment in two-layer networks training is a two-edged sword
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.10791