<story><title>Neural Network Loss Landscapes: What do we know? (2021)</title><url>https://damueller.com/#/blog-post/NNLLs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>MauranKilom</author><text>The &amp;quot;wedge&amp;quot; part under &amp;quot;3. Mode Connectivity&amp;quot; has at least one obvious component: Neural networks tend to be invariant to permuting nodes (together with their connections) within a layer. Simply put, it doesn&amp;#x27;t matter in what order you number the K nodes of e.g. a fully connected layer, but that alone already means there are K! different solutions with exactly the same behavior. Equivalently, the loss landscape is symmetric to certain permutations of its dimensions.&lt;p&gt;This means that, at the very least, there are &lt;i&gt;many&lt;/i&gt; global optima (well, unless all permutable weights end up with the same value, which is obviously not the case). The fact that different initializations&amp;#x2F;early training steps can end up in different but equivalent optima follows directly from this symmetry. But whether all their basins are connected, or whether there are just multiple equivalent basins, is much less clear. The &amp;quot;non-linear&amp;quot; connection stuff does seem to imply that they are all in some (high-dimensional, non-linear) valley.&lt;p&gt;To be clear, this is just me looking at these results from the &amp;quot;permutation&amp;quot; perspective above, because it leads to a few obvious conclusions. But I am not qualified to judge which of these results are more or less profound.</text></comment>
<story><title>Neural Network Loss Landscapes: What do we know? (2021)</title><url>https://damueller.com/#/blog-post/NNLLs</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>evolvingstuff</author><text>Here are some &amp;quot;animated&amp;quot; loss landscapes I made quite a long time ago:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;evolvingstuff.blogspot.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;animated-fractal-fitness-landscapes.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;evolvingstuff.blogspot.com&amp;#x2F;2011&amp;#x2F;02&amp;#x2F;animated-fractal-f...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;These are related to recurrent neural networks evolved to maximize fitness whilst wandering through a randomly generated maze and picking up food pellets (the advantage being to remember not to revisit where you have already been.)</text></comment>