In plain words: Deep residual networks — which add each layer's input to its output — with any nonlinear activation never get stuck at a bad local minimum, a proof shows. Every such minimum is at least as good as the best classical model's solution, settling a 2018 open question.
Abstract
In this paper, we prove that depth with nonlinearity creates no bad local minima in a type of arbitrarily deep ResNets with arbitrary nonlinear activation functions, in the sense that the values of all local minima are no worse than the global minimum value of corresponding classical machine-learning models, and are guaranteed to further improve via residual representations. As a result, this paper provides an affirmative answer to an open question stated in a paper in the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2018. This paper advances the optimization theory of deep learning only for ResNets and not for other network architectures.
Kenji Kawaguchi, Yoshua Bengio
arXiv:1810.09038 · stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG, math.OC · submitted Oct 21, 2018 · updated Jul 9, 2019
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