Topological obstruction to the training of shallow ReLU neural networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nurisso, Marco, Leroy, Pierrick, Vaccarino, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Nurisso, Marco
Leroy, Pierrick
Vaccarino, Francesco
author_facet Nurisso, Marco
Leroy, Pierrick
Vaccarino, Francesco
contents Studying the interplay between the geometry of the loss landscape and the optimization trajectories of simple neural networks is a fundamental step for understanding their behavior in more complex settings. This paper reveals the presence of topological obstruction in the loss landscape of shallow ReLU neural networks trained using gradient flow. We discuss how the homogeneous nature of the ReLU activation function constrains the training trajectories to lie on a product of quadric hypersurfaces whose shape depends on the particular initialization of the network's parameters. When the neural network's output is a single scalar, we prove that these quadrics can have multiple connected components, limiting the set of reachable parameters during training. We analytically compute the number of these components and discuss the possibility of mapping one to the other through neuron rescaling and permutation. In this simple setting, we find that the non-connectedness results in a topological obstruction, which, depending on the initialization, can make the global optimum unreachable. We validate this result with numerical experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14837
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Topological obstruction to the training of shallow ReLU neural networks
Nurisso, Marco
Leroy, Pierrick
Vaccarino, Francesco
Machine Learning
Algebraic Geometry
Algebraic Topology
68T07 (Primary) 57N65, 14R05 (Secondary)
I.2.6
Studying the interplay between the geometry of the loss landscape and the optimization trajectories of simple neural networks is a fundamental step for understanding their behavior in more complex settings. This paper reveals the presence of topological obstruction in the loss landscape of shallow ReLU neural networks trained using gradient flow. We discuss how the homogeneous nature of the ReLU activation function constrains the training trajectories to lie on a product of quadric hypersurfaces whose shape depends on the particular initialization of the network's parameters. When the neural network's output is a single scalar, we prove that these quadrics can have multiple connected components, limiting the set of reachable parameters during training. We analytically compute the number of these components and discuss the possibility of mapping one to the other through neuron rescaling and permutation. In this simple setting, we find that the non-connectedness results in a topological obstruction, which, depending on the initialization, can make the global optimum unreachable. We validate this result with numerical experiments.
title Topological obstruction to the training of shallow ReLU neural networks
topic Machine Learning
Algebraic Geometry
Algebraic Topology
68T07 (Primary) 57N65, 14R05 (Secondary)
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14837