We study the supervised learning problem under either of the following two models: (1) Feature vectors @math are @math -dimensional Gaussians and responses are @math for @math an unknown quadratic function; (2) Feature vectors @math are distributed as a mixture of two @math -dimensional centered Gaussians, and @math 's are the corresponding class labels. We use two-layers neural networks with quadratic activations, and compare three different learning regimes: the random features (RF) regime in which we only train the second-layer weights; the neural tangent (NT) regime in which we train a linearization of the neural network around its initialization; the fully trained neural network (NN) regime in which we train all the weights in the network. We prove that, even for the simple quadratic model of point (1), there is a potentially unbounded gap between the prediction risk achieved in these three training regimes, when the number of neurons is smaller than the ambient dimension. When the number of neurons is larger than the number of dimensions, the problem is significantly easier and both NT and NN learning achieve zero risk.
Chizat and Bach @cite_12 clarified that any nonlinear statistical model can be approximated by a linear one in an early () training regime. The basic argument is quite simple. Given a model @math with parameters @math , we can Taylor-expand around a random initialization @math . Setting @math , we get Here the second approximation holds since, for many random initializations, @math because of random cancellations. The resulting model @math is linear, with random features.
@cite_12
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We consider the problem of learning an unknown function @math on the @math -dimensional sphere with respect to the square loss, given i.i.d. samples @math where @math is a feature vector uniformly distributed on the sphere and @math . We study two popular classes of models that can be regarded as linearizations of two-layers neural networks around a random initialization: (RF) The random feature model of Rahimi-Recht; (NT) The neural tangent kernel model of Jacot-Gabriel-Hongler. Both these approaches can also be regarded as randomized approximations of kernel ridge regression (with respect to different kernels), and hence enjoy universal approximation properties when the number of neurons @math diverges, for a fixed dimension @math . We prove that, if both @math and @math are large, the behavior of these models is instead remarkably simpler. If @math , then RF performs no better than linear regression with respect to the raw features @math , and NT performs no better than linear regression with respect to degree-one and two monomials in the @math . More generally, if @math then RF fits at most a degree- @math polynomial in the raw features, and NT fits at most a degree- @math polynomial. It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum, and Adam. It reaches equivalent test accuracies after the same number of training epochs, but with fewer parameter updates, leading to greater parallelism and shorter training times. We can further reduce the number of parameter updates by increasing the learning rate @math and scaling the batch size @math . Finally, one can increase the momentum coefficient @math and scale @math , although this tends to slightly reduce the test accuracy. Crucially, our techniques allow us to repurpose existing training schedules for large batch training with no hyper-parameter tuning. We train Inception-ResNet-V2 on ImageNet to @math validation accuracy in under 2500 parameter updates, efficiently utilizing training batches of 65536 images. This paper tackles two related questions at the heart of machine learning; how can we predict if a minimum will generalize to the test set, and why does stochastic gradient descent find minima that generalize well? Our work is inspired by (2017), who showed deep networks can easily memorize randomly labeled training data, despite generalizing well when shown real labels of the same inputs. We show here that the same phenomenon occurs in small linear models. These observations are explained by evaluating the Bayesian evidence, which penalizes sharp minima but is invariant to model parameterization. We also explore the "generalization gap" between small and large batch training, identifying an optimum batch size which maximizes the test set accuracy. Interpreting stochastic gradient descent as a stochastic differential equation, we identify a "noise scale" @math , where @math is the learning rate, @math training set size and @math batch size. Consequently the optimum batch size is proportional to the learning rate and the training set size, @math . We verify these predictions empirically. It is common practice to decay the learning rate. Here we show one can usually obtain the same learning curve on both training and test sets by instead increasing the batch size during training. This procedure is successful for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), SGD with momentum, Nesterov momentum, and Adam. It reaches equivalent test accuracies after the same number of training epochs, but with fewer parameter updates, leading to greater parallelism and shorter training times. We can further reduce the number of parameter updates by increasing the learning rate @math and scaling the batch size @math . Finally, one can increase the momentum coefficient @math and scale @math , although this tends to slightly reduce the test accuracy. Crucially, our techniques allow us to repurpose existing training schedules for large batch training with no hyper-parameter tuning. We train ResNet-50 on ImageNet to @math validation accuracy in under 30 minutes.