Can multilayer neural networks -- typically constructed as highly complex structures with many nonlinearly activated neurons across layers -- behave in a non-trivial way that yet simplifies away a major part of their complexities? In this work, we uncover a phenomenon in which the behavior of these complex networks -- under suitable scalings and stochastic gradient descent dynamics -- becomes independent of the number of neurons as this number grows sufficiently large. We develop a formalism in which this many-neurons limiting behavior is captured by a set of equations, thereby exposing a previously unknown operating regime of these networks. While the current pursuit is mathematically non-rigorous, it is complemented with several experiments that validate the existence of this behavior.
Contemporary deep neural networks exhibit impressive results on practical problems. These networks generalize well although their inherent capacity may extend significantly beyond the number of training examples. We analyze this behavior in the context of deep, infinite neural networks. We show that deep infinite layers are naturally aligned with Gaussian processes and kernel methods, and devise stochastic kernels that encode the information of these networks. We show that stability results apply despite the size, offering an explanation for their empirical success.