text: Optimizing deep neural networks is largely thought to be an empirical process, requiring manual tuning of several parameters, such as learning rate, weight decay, and dropout rate. Arguably, the learning rate is the most important of these to tune, and this has gained more attention in recent works. In this paper, we propose a novel method to compute the learning rate for training deep neural networks. We derive a theoretical framework to compute learning rates dynamically, and then show experimental results on standard datasets and architectures to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
  @cite_35: One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies this surprising phenomenon for two-layer fully connected ReLU activated neural networks. For an @math hidden node shallow neural network with ReLU activation and @math training data, we show as long as @math is large enough and no two inputs are parallel, randomly initialized gradient descent converges to a globally optimal solution at a linear convergence rate for the quadratic loss function. Our analysis relies on the following observation: over-parameterization and random initialization jointly restrict every weight vector to be close to its initialization for all iterations, which allows us to exploit a strong convexity-like property to show that gradient descent converges at a global linear rate to the global optimum. We believe these insights are also useful in analyzing deep models and other first order methods.
  @cite_7: We study the problem of training deep neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function using gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. In particular, we study the binary classification problem and show that for a broad family of loss functions, with proper random weight initialization, both gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent can find the global minima of the training loss for an over-parameterized deep ReLU network, under mild assumption on the training data. The key idea of our proof is that Gaussian random initialization followed by (stochastic) gradient descent produces a sequence of iterates that stay inside a small perturbation region centering around the initial weights, in which the empirical loss function of deep ReLU networks enjoys nice local curvature properties that ensure the global convergence of (stochastic) gradient descent. Our theoretical results shed light on understanding the optimization for deep learning, and pave the way for studying the optimization dynamics of training modern deep neural networks.
summary: Our work is also motivated by recent works that theoretically show that stochastic gradient descent is sufficient to optimize over-parameterized neural networks, making minimal assumptions @cite_7 @cite_35 . Our aim is to mathematically identify an optimal learning rate, rejecting the notion that only small learning rates must be used, and then experimentally show the validity of our claims.