In plain words: It reviews three ways to measure how many input-output patterns a network can represent, showing all three grow exponentially with depth and are driven by the network's path length. Image experiments confirm earlier layers shape expressivity most, and training trades flexibility for stability.
Abstract
We survey results on neural network expressivity described in "On the Expressive Power of Deep Neural Networks". The paper motivates and develops three natural measures of expressiveness, which all display an exponential dependence on the depth of the network. In fact, all of these measures are related to a fourth quantity, trajectory length. This quantity grows exponentially in the depth of the network, and is responsible for the depth sensitivity observed. These results translate to consequences for networks during and after training. They suggest that parameters earlier in a network have greater influence on its expressive power -- in particular, given a layer, its influence on expressivity is determined by the remaining depth of the network after that layer. This is verified with experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10. We also explore the effect of training on the input-output map, and find that it trades off between the stability and expressivity.
Maithra Raghu, Ben Poole, Jon Kleinberg, Surya Ganguli, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
arXiv:1611.08083 · stat.ML, cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Nov 24, 2016
abstract · pdf · html · Presented at NIPS 2016 Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning in Complex Systems