Convergence of Gradient Descent for General Neural Network Architectures Beyond the NTK Regime
Training dynamics is central to understanding neural networks, yet its theoretical analysis remains difficult even for simple architectures and becomes substantially more challenging for general modern architectures. In this paper, we propose a convergence framework for analyzing gradient descent (GD) dynamics under a broad family of neural network architectures and datasets beyond the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime. The framework is formulated at the level of network blocks and covers architectures including pre-normalized multi-layer transformers. More precisely, under mild assumptions, we prove that for almost all initializations, GD with regular learning rates converges to the neighbourhood of a stationary point. This is mainly proved by establishing an iterate-dependent PL-type inequality through analyticity and measure-zero arguments, and by proving Lipschitz smoothness along the GD trajectory through polynomial generalized smoothness and a local relaxed dissipative condition. We further interpret the theorem under Xavier initialization and practical architectural scaling, showing that the learning rate scale depends on the depth and effective bottleneck dimensions rather than the largest width. Finally, we derive structural nondegeneracy implications for residual connections and function composition, and provide a generic characterization of global minimizers within our framework.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Gradient Flow Convergence Guarantee for General Neural Network Architectures
A key challenge in modern deep learning theory is to explain the remarkable success of gradient-based optimization methods when training large-scale, complex deep neural networks. Though linear convergence of such method…
On the Almost Sure Convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent in Non-Convex Problems
This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD rem…
On the Convergence of Gradient Descent in GANs: MMD GAN As a Gradient Flow
We consider the maximum mean discrepancy ($\mathrm{MMD}$) GAN problem and propose a parametric kernelized gradient flow that mimics the min-max game in gradient regularized $\mathrm{MMD}$ GAN. We show that this flow prov…
On the Convergence of Gradient Descent for Large Learning Rates
A vast literature on convergence guarantees for gradient descent and derived methods exists at the moment. However, a simple practical situation remains unexplored: when a fixed step size is used, can we expect gradient …
Backtracking gradient descent method for general $C^1$ functions, with applications to Deep Learning
While Standard gradient descent is one very popular optimisation method, its convergence cannot be proven beyond the class of functions whose gradient is globally Lipschitz continuous. As such, it is not actually applica…