Poster
SGD Converges to Global Minimum in Deep Learning via Star-convex Path
Yi Zhou · Junjie Yang · Huishuai Zhang · Yingbin Liang · VAHID TAROKH
Great Hall BC #24
Keywords: [ deep learning ] [ sgd ] [ convergence ] [ global minimum ]
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a global minimum. In this study, we establish the convergence of SGD to a global minimum for nonconvex optimization problems that are commonly encountered in neural network training. Our argument exploits the following two important properties: 1) the training loss can achieve zero value (approximately), which has been widely observed in deep learning; 2) SGD follows a star-convex path, which is verified by various experiments in this paper. In such a context, our analysis shows that SGD, although has long been considered as a randomized algorithm, converges in an intrinsically deterministic manner to a global minimum.
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