Behind the Scenes of Gradient Descent: A Trajectory Analysis via Basis Function Decomposition
This work analyzes the solution trajectory of gradient-based algorithms via a novel basis function decomposition. We show that, although solution trajectories of gradient-based algorithms may vary depending on the learning task, they behave almost monotonically when projected onto an appropriate orthonormal function basis. Such projection gives rise to a basis function decomposition of the solution trajectory. Theoretically, we use our proposed basis function decomposition to establish the convergence of gradient descent (GD) on several representative learning tasks. In particular, we improve the convergence of GD on symmetric matrix factorization and provide a completely new convergence result for the orthogonal symmetric tensor decomposition. Empirically, we illustrate the promise of our proposed framework on realistic deep neural networks (DNNs) across different architectures, gradient-based solvers, and datasets. Our key finding is that gradient-based algorithms monotonically learn the coefficients of a particular orthonormal function basis of DNNs defined as the eigenvectors of the conjugate kernel after training. Our code is available at https://github.com/jianhaoma/function-basis-decomposition.
Code (1)
Tasks
Tensor DecompositionSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Continuous vs. Discrete Optimization of Deep Neural Networks
Existing analyses of optimization in deep learning are either continuous, focusing on (variants of) gradient flow, or discrete, directly treating (variants of) gradient descent. Gradient flow is amenable to theoretical a…
Computational EfficiencyDeep LearningLearning TheoryOpen-Ended Question AnsweringTutorial on Variational Autoencoders
In just three years, Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have emerged as one of the most popular approaches to unsupervised learning of complicated distributions. VAEs are appealing because they are built on top of standard …
The Physical Systems Behind Optimization Algorithms
We use differential equations based approaches to provide some {\it \textbf{physics}} insights into analyzing the dynamics of popular optimization algorithms in machine learning. In particular, we study gradient descent,…
BIG-bench Machine LearningDirectional Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent via von Mises-Fisher Distributions in Deep learning
Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a driving force behind the recent success of deep learning, our understanding of its dynamics in a high-dimensional parameter space is limited. In recent years, some research…
On a continuous time model of gradient descent dynamics and instability in deep learning
The recipe behind the success of deep learning has been the combination of neural networks and gradient-based optimization. Understanding the behavior of gradient descent however, and particularly its instability, has la…
Deep Learning