In plain words: Training a two- or three-layer convolutional network can be rewritten as a math problem with one clear best answer, solvable in a reasonable number of steps, unlike the usual trial-and-error gradient descent. The rewrite shows the architecture itself acts like simple weight-shrinking.
Abstract · Implicit Convex Regularizers of CNN Architectures: Convex Optimization of Two- and Three-Layer Networks in Polynomial Time
We study training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ReLU activations and introduce exact convex optimization formulations with a polynomial complexity with respect to the number of data samples, the number of neurons, and data dimension. More specifically, we develop a convex analytic framework utilizing semi-infinite duality to obtain equivalent convex optimization problems for several two- and three-layer CNN architectures. We first prove that two-layer CNNs can be globally optimized via an $\ell_2$ norm regularized convex program. We then show that multi-layer circular CNN training problems with a single ReLU layer are equivalent to an $\ell_1$ regularized convex program that encourages sparsity in the spectral domain. We also extend these results to three-layer CNNs with two ReLU layers. Furthermore, we present extensions of our approach to different pooling methods, which elucidates the implicit architectural bias as convex regularizers.
Tolga Ergen, Mert Pilanci
arXiv:2006.14798 · cs.LG, cs.CC, stat.ML · submitted Jun 26, 2020 · updated Mar 18, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted for Spotlight Presentation at ICLR 2021