证明了在特定条件下,最平坦的神经网络解能良好泛化。
Flatness and Generalization: Learning Multi-Index Models with Homogeneous Neural Networks

- 通过分析双层齐次网络中的平坦性与泛化关系,揭示其内在联系。
- 在低误差和噪声下,最平坦解的总体损失很小,可实现良好泛化。
- 适用于多种激活函数和真实数据分布,突破对称性干扰的局限。
传统观点认为‘平坦的拟合解泛化性能好’(Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1994;Keskar et al., 2017),其中平坦性可通过经验损失的海森矩阵迹衡量。然而,Dinh 等人(2017)指出,利用网络对称性可改变平坦度而不影响总体与经验损失,使该观点失去意义。本文研究使用两层非凸齐次神经网络学习未知多指标模型时,尽管存在对称性,平坦性与泛化之间仍存在关联。我们发现:对于所有拟合解中‘最平坦’的解(即平坦度阶次最小者),若数据由单指标模型之和生成,且近似误差与标签噪声较低,则该最平坦解必然达到小的总体损失,即始终泛化良好。这一结论在一大类激活函数和现实数据分布下成立。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A common heuristic used to explain the generalization of first-order gradient methods on non-convex neural networks is that "flat interpolators generalize well" (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1994; Keskar et al., 2017), where flatness can be measured by the trace of the Hessian of the empirical loss. However, Dinh et al. 2017) showed that, using symmetry of the network that can change flatness while keeping the population and empirical losses unchanged, any interpolator can be made sharper or flatter. This result makes the earlier heuristic statement vacuous. In this paper, we show that for learning an unknown multi-index model with $2$-layer non-convex homogeneous neural networks, there is a connection between flatness and generalization, despite the existence of symmetries. This connection pertains to the "flattest" interpolators, i.e., the interpolators that have orderwise minimum flatness among all interpolators. First, we show that there exists a natural class of non-generalizing interpolators whose flatness cannot be made closer to the flattest possible, even using symmetries. Second, we show that for data generated by a sum of single-index models, if the approximation error and label noise are low, any flattest interpolator achieves small population loss, i.e., the flattest interpolators always generalize. This establishes a direct link between flatness and generalization which applies to a large class of activations and realistic data distributions.
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