Title
Critical Points of Linear Neural Networks: Analytical Forms and Landscape Properties
Abstract
Due to the success of deep learning to solving a variety of challenging machine learning tasks, there is a rising interest in understanding loss functions for training neural networks from a theoretical aspect. Particularly, the properties of critical points and the landscape around them are of importance to determine the convergence performance of optimization algorithms. In this paper, we provide a necessary and sufficient characterization of the analytical forms for the critical points (as well as global minimizers) of the square loss functions for linear neural networks. We show that the analytical forms of the critical points characterize the values of the corresponding loss functions as well as the necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve global minimum. Furthermore, we exploit the analytical forms of the critical points to characterize the landscape properties for the loss functions of linear neural networks and shallow ReLU networks. One particular conclusion is that: While the loss function of linear networks has no spurious local minimum, the loss function of one-hidden-layer nonlinear networks with ReLU activation function does have local minimum that is not global minimum.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
international conference on learning representations
Convergence (routing),Mathematical optimization,Activation function,Exploit,Optimization algorithm,Artificial intelligence,Deep learning,Critical point (mathematics),Artificial neural network,Spurious relationship,Mathematics
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
10
0.53
References 
Authors
11
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yi Zhou16517.55
Yingbin Liang21646147.64