Optimization-Based Separations for Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that deeper neural networks can be efficiently trained to learn certain functions, providing the first provable separation showing the advantage of depth in neural network optimization and approximation.

Contribution

It proves that gradient descent can efficiently learn radial functions with a depth-2 neural network, establishing a concrete optimization-based separation for neural network depth benefits.

Findings

Gradient descent efficiently learns radial functions with depth-2 networks.

Deeper architectures can have provable optimization advantages over shallower ones.

Certain functions cannot be learned efficiently by shallow networks or standard algorithms.

Abstract

Depth separation results propose a possible theoretical explanation for the benefits of deep neural networks over shallower architectures, establishing that the former possess superior approximation capabilities. However, there are no known results in which the deeper architecture leverages this advantage into a provable optimization guarantee. We prove that when the data are generated by a distribution with radial symmetry which satisfies some mild assumptions, gradient descent can efficiently learn ball indicator functions using a depth 2 neural network with two layers of sigmoidal activations, and where the hidden layer is held fixed throughout training. By building on and refining existing techniques for approximation lower bounds of neural networks with a single layer of non-linearities, we show that there are $d$-dimensional radial distributions on the data such that ball indicators cannot be learned efficiently by any algorithm to accuracy better than $\Omega(d^{-4})$, nor by a standard gradient descent implementation to accuracy better than a constant. These results establish what is to the best of our knowledge, the first optimization-based separations where the approximation benefits of the stronger architecture provably manifest in practice. Our proof technique introduces new tools and ideas that may be of independent interest in the theoretical study of both the approximation and optimization of neural networks.