Exact Solutions of a Deep Linear Network

Liu Ziyin, Botao Li, Xiangming Meng

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track DOI: 10.52202/068431-1775

This work finds the analytical expression of the global minima of a deep linear network with weight decay and stochastic neurons, a fundamental model for understanding the landscape of neural networks. Our result implies that zero is a special point in deep neural network architecture. We show that weight decay strongly interacts with the model architecture and can create bad minima at zero in a network with more than $1$ hidden layer, qualitatively different from a network with only $1$ hidden layer. Practically, our result implies that common deep learning initialization methods are insufficient to ease the optimization of neural networks in general.