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Exponentially vanishing sub-optimal local minima in multilayer neural networks

3 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

3 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Background: Statistical mechanics results (Dauphin et al. (2014); Choromanska et al. (2015)) suggest that local minima with high error are exponentially rare in high dimensions. However, to prove low error guarantees for Multilayer Neural Networks (MNNs), previous works so far required either a heavily modified MNN model or training method, strong assumptions on the labels (e.g., "near" linear separability), or an unrealistic hidden layer with $\Omega\left(N\right)$ units. Results: We examine a MNN with one hidden layer of piecewise linear units, a single output, and a quadratic loss. We prove that, with high probability in the limit of $N\rightarrow\infty$ datapoints, the volume of differentiable regions of the empiric loss containing sub-optimal differentiable local minima is exponentially vanishing in comparison with the same volume of global minima, given standard normal input of dimension $d_{0}=\tilde{\Omega}\left(\sqrt{N}\right)$, and a more realistic number of $d_{1}=\tilde{\Omega}\left(N/d_{0}\right)$ hidden units. We demonstrate our results numerically: for example, $0\%$ binary classification training error on CIFAR with only $N/d_{0}\approx 16$ hidden neurons.

fields

cs.LG 3

verdicts

UNVERDICTED 3

representative citing papers

Exploring Model-based Planning with Policy Networks

cs.LG · 2019-06-20 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

POPLIN combines policy networks with model-predictive planning by optimizing either action sequences or policy parameters, yielding 3x better sample efficiency than PETS, TD3 and SAC on MuJoCo locomotion tasks.

A Theory on Flow Matching with Neural Networks

cs.LG · 2026-06-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Establishes convergence guarantees for overparameterized 2-layer ReLU networks in flow matching, generalization bounds for the velocity-field objective, and Wasserstein guarantees for generated samples, using multi-task representation learning bounds.

citing papers explorer

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

  • Exploring Model-based Planning with Policy Networks cs.LG · 2019-06-20 · unverdicted · none · ref 37 · internal anchor

    POPLIN combines policy networks with model-predictive planning by optimizing either action sequences or policy parameters, yielding 3x better sample efficiency than PETS, TD3 and SAC on MuJoCo locomotion tasks.

  • A Theory on Flow Matching with Neural Networks cs.LG · 2026-06-08 · unverdicted · none · ref 153 · internal anchor

    Establishes convergence guarantees for overparameterized 2-layer ReLU networks in flow matching, generalization bounds for the velocity-field objective, and Wasserstein guarantees for generated samples, using multi-task representation learning bounds.

  • Self-Play Fine-Tuning Converts Weak Language Models to Strong Language Models cs.LG · 2024-01-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 125 · internal anchor

    SPIN lets weak LLMs become strong by self-generating training data from previous model versions and training to prefer human-annotated responses over its own outputs, outperforming DPO even with extra GPT-4 data on benchmarks.