We revisit the initialization of deep residual networks (ResNets) by introducing a novel analytical tool in free probability to the community of deep learning. This tool deals with non-Hermitian random matrices, rather than their conventional Hermitian counterparts in the literature. As a consequence, this new tool enables us to evaluate the singular value spectrum of the input-output Jacobian of a fully-connected deep ResNet for both linear and nonlinear cases. With the powerful tool of free probability, we conduct an asymptotic analysis of the spectrum on the single-layer case, and then extend this analysis to the multi-layer case of an arbitrary number of layers. In particular, we propose to rescale the classical random initialization by the number of residual units, so that the spectrum has the order of @math , when compared with the large width and depth of the network. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed initialization scheme learns at a speed of orders of magnitudes faster than the classical ones, and thus attests a strong practical relevance of this investigation.
The authors in @cite_8 argue that random Gaussian initialization results in an ill-conditioned Jacobian, and propose to use orthogonal weights initialization to achieve dynamical isometry in deep networks. The recent works @cite_17 @cite_15 open the door for a direct application of random matrix theory, particularly , to evaluating the Jacobian spectrum of a deep network, in which the singular value distribution of the Jacobian of a fully-connected network is analytically given as a function of depth, random initialization and nonlinearity. In @cite_1 the authors prove the existence of a global optimal solution for linear ResNets, if the spectral norms of the weights are bounded by (O(1 L) ) and therefore, small random weights that is normalized by the layer number (L ), helps deep residual learning.
@cite_15 @cite_1 @cite_17 @cite_8
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It is well known that weight initialization in deep networks can have a dramatic impact on learning speed. For example, ensuring the mean squared singular value of a network's input-output Jacobian is O(1) is essential for avoiding exponentially vanishing or exploding gradients. Moreover, in deep linear networks, ensuring that all singular values of the Jacobian are concentrated near 1 can yield a dramatic additional speed-up in learning; this is a property known as dynamical isometry. However, it is unclear how to achieve dynamical isometry in nonlinear deep networks. We address this question by employing powerful tools from free probability theory to analytically compute the entire singular value distribution of a deep network's input-output Jacobian. We explore the dependence of the singular value distribution on the depth of the network, the weight initialization, and the choice of nonlinearity. Intriguingly, we find that ReLU networks are incapable of dynamical isometry. On the other hand, sigmoidal networks can achieve isometry, but only with orthogonal weight initialization. Moreover, we demonstrate empirically that deep nonlinear networks achieving dynamical isometry learn orders of magnitude faster than networks that do not. Indeed, we show that properly-initialized deep sigmoidal networks consistently outperform deep ReLU networks. Overall, our analysis reveals that controlling the entire distribution of Jacobian singular values is an important design consideration in deep learning. Recent work has shown that tight concentration of the entire spectrum of singular values of a deep network's input-output Jacobian around one at initialization can speed up learning by orders of magnitude. Therefore, to guide important design choices, it is important to build a full theoretical understanding of the spectra of Jacobians at initialization. To this end, we leverage powerful tools from free probability theory to provide a detailed analytic understanding of how a deep network's Jacobian spectrum depends on various hyperparameters including the nonlinearity, the weight and bias distributions, and the depth. For a variety of nonlinearities, our work reveals the emergence of new universal limiting spectral distributions that remain concentrated around one even as the depth goes to infinity. Recent work (, 2017) suggests that controlling the entire distribution of Jacobian singular values is an important design consideration in deep learning. Motivated by this, we study the distribution of singular values of the Jacobian of the generator in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). We find that this Jacobian generally becomes ill-conditioned at the beginning of training. Moreover, we find that the average (with z from p(z)) conditioning of the generator is highly predictive of two other ad-hoc metrics for measuring the 'quality' of trained GANs: the Inception Score and the Frechet Inception Distance (FID). We test the hypothesis that this relationship is causal by proposing a 'regularization' technique (called Jacobian Clamping) that softly penalizes the condition number of the generator Jacobian. Jacobian Clamping improves the mean Inception Score and the mean FID for GANs trained on several datasets. It also greatly reduces inter-run variance of the aforementioned scores, addressing (at least partially) one of the main criticisms of GANs. Random matrices tend to be well conditioned, and we employ this well known property to advance matrix computations. We prove that our algorithms employing Gaussian random matrices are efficient, but in our tests the algorithms have consistently remained as powerful where we used sparse and structured random matrices, defined by much fewer random parameters. We numerically stabilize Gaussian elimination with no pivoting as well as block Gaussian elimination, precondition an ill conditioned linear system of equations, compute numerical rank of a matrix without orthogonalization and pivoting, approximate the singular spaces of an ill conditioned matrix associated with its largest and smallest singular values, and approximate this matrix with low-rank matrices, with applications to its 2-by-2 block triangulation and to tensor decomposition. Some of our results and techniques can be of independent interest, e.g., our estimates for the condition numbers of random Toeplitz and circulant matrices and our variations of the Sherman--Morrison--Woodbury formula.