In plain words: Adding one extra neuron to each output of a deep network makes every local minimum the best solution, so training can't get stuck in a bad one. The proof covers classification and regression with any loss, and the neurons switch themselves off at the end.
Abstract
In this paper, we theoretically prove that adding one special neuron per output unit eliminates all suboptimal local minima of any deep neural network, for multi-class classification, binary classification, and regression with an arbitrary loss function, under practical assumptions. At every local minimum of any deep neural network with these added neurons, the set of parameters of the original neural network (without added neurons) is guaranteed to be a global minimum of the original neural network. The effects of the added neurons are proven to automatically vanish at every local minimum. Moreover, we provide a novel theoretical characterization of a failure mode of eliminating suboptimal local minima via an additional theorem and several examples. This paper also introduces a novel proof technique based on the perturbable gradient basis (PGB) necessary condition of local minima, which provides new insight into the elimination of local minima and is applicable to analyze various models and transformations of objective functions beyond the elimination of local minima.
Kenji Kawaguchi, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
arXiv:1901.00279 · cs.LG, cs.NE, math.OC, stat.ML · submitted Jan 2, 2019 · updated Jan 15, 2020
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to appear in AISTATS 2020