A Dynamical View on Optimization Algorithms of Overparameterized Neural Networks
This provides theoretical insights into practical optimization methods for neural networks, but it is incremental as it builds on existing NTK and convex optimization frameworks.
The paper analyzes the convergence behavior of optimization algorithms like Heavy Ball and Nesterov accelerated gradient descent for overparameterized neural networks, showing that Heavy Ball converges linearly to global minimum on MSE while Nesterov may converge sublinearly.
When equipped with efficient optimization algorithms, the over-parameterized neural networks have demonstrated high level of performance even though the loss function is non-convex and non-smooth. While many works have been focusing on understanding the loss dynamics by training neural networks with the gradient descent (GD), in this work, we consider a broad class of optimization algorithms that are commonly used in practice. For example, we show from a dynamical system perspective that the Heavy Ball (HB) method can converge to global minimum on mean squared error (MSE) at a linear rate (similar to GD); however, the Nesterov accelerated gradient descent (NAG) may only converges to global minimum sublinearly. Our results rely on the connection between neural tangent kernel (NTK) and finite over-parameterized neural networks with ReLU activation, which leads to analyzing the limiting ordinary differential equations (ODE) for optimization algorithms. We show that, optimizing the non-convex loss over the weights corresponds to optimizing some strongly convex loss over the prediction error. As a consequence, we can leverage the classical convex optimization theory to understand the convergence behavior of neural networks. We believe our approach can also be extended to other optimization algorithms and network architectures.