A Diffusion Theory For Deep Learning Dynamics: Stochastic Gradient Descent Exponentially Favors Flat Minima

May 3, 2021

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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods for training deep networks in practice. SGD is known to find a flat minimum that often generalizes well. However, it is mathematically unclear how deep learning can select a flat minimum among so many minima. To answer the question quantitatively, we develop a density diffusion theory (DDT) to reveal how minima selection quantitatively depends on the minima sharpness and the hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to theoretically and empirically prove that, benefited from the Hessian-dependent covariance of stochastic gradient noise, SGD favors flat minima exponentially more than sharp minima, while Gradient Descent (GD) with injected white noise favors flat minima only polynomially more than sharp minima. We also reveal that either a small learning rate or large-batch training requires exponentially many iterations to escape from minima in terms of the ratio of the batch size and learning rate. Thus, large-batch training cannot search flat minima efficiently in a realistic computational time.

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About ICLR 2021

The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of the branch of artificial intelligence called representation learning, but generally referred to as deep learning. ICLR is globally renowned for presenting and publishing cutting-edge research on all aspects of deep learning used in the fields of artificial intelligence, statistics and data science, as well as important application areas such as machine vision, computational biology, speech recognition, text understanding, gaming, and robotics.

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