Technology
Provable Guarantees for Nonlinear Feature Learning in Three-Layer Neural Networks
One of the central questions in the theory of deep learning is to understand how neural networks learn hierarchical features. The ability of deep networks to extract salient features is crucial to both their outstanding generalization ability and the modern deep learning paradigm of pretraining and finetuneing. However, this feature learning process remains poorly understood from a theoretical perspective, with existing analyses largely restricted to two-layer networks. In this work we show that three-layer neural networks have provably richer feature learning capabilities than two-layer networks. We analyze the features learned by a three-layer network trained with layer-wise gradient descent, and present a general purpose theorem which upper bounds the sample complexity and width needed to achieve low test error when the target has specific hierarchical structure. We instantiate our framework in specific statistical learning settings - single-index models and functions of quadratic features - and show that in the latter setting three-layer networks obtain a sample complexity improvement over all existing guarantees for two-layer networks. Crucially, this sample complexity improvement relies on the ability of three-layer networks to efficiently learn nonlinear features. We then establish a concrete optimization-based depth separation by constructing a function which is efficiently learnable via gradient descent on a three-layer network, yet cannot be learned efficiently by a two-layer network. Our work makes progress towards understanding the provable benefit of three-layer neural networks over two-layer networks in the feature learning regime.
Appendix for based Test of Independence for Cluster correlated Data Contents
In this section, we present some preliminary results that will be useful in proving Theorem 3.2, Theorem 3.3 and Proposition 3.4. We draw upon existing theory on properties of random kernel matrices and extend these properties to cluster-correlated data. Specifically, we show the convergence of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of an empirical kernel matrix based on clustered data. Let (X,F,P) be a probability space and H be a Hilbert space over (X,F,P) with a symmetric kernel function k: X X R. Let H be a compact operator on H, defined by Hg(x) = Z Equivalently, Hn can be viewed as an n nreal matrix whose (i,j)-th entry is {Hn}i,j = 1 n k(Xi,Xj). This is the empirical kernel matrix scaled by a factor of 1/n. Here we restrict our discussion to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) H, where the kernel function k is positive semi-definite. We also assume that the operator H is Hilbert-Schmidt, with E[k2(X,X0)] < . Let ฮป(T) denote the spectrum of a compact, symmetric operator T. Then ฮป(H) and ฮป(Hn) are the sets of eigenvalues for H and Hn, respectively.
AKernel-based Test of Independence for Cluster-correlated Data
The Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) is a powerful kernel-based statistic for assessing the generalized dependence between two multivariate variables. However, independence testing based on the HSIC is not directly possible for cluster-correlated data. Such a correlation pattern among the observations arises in many practical situations, e.g., family-based and longitudinal data, and requires proper accommodation. Therefore, we propose a novel HSIC-based independence test to evaluate the dependence between two multivariate variables based on clustercorrelated data. Using the previously proposed empirical HSIC as our test statistic, we derive its asymptotic distribution under the null hypothesis of independence between the two variables but in the presence of sample correlation. Based on both simulation studies and real data analysis, we show that, with clustered data, our approach effectively controls type I error and has a higher statistical power than competing methods.
Appendix ANetwork Architectures
In this section, we describe the details of the network architectures used in Sec. 4 and 5. We mainly used 4 GPUs (NVIDIAV100; 16GB) for the experiments in Sec. 4 and 5 and it took about 4 hours per seed (in the case of 3M steps). Actually, we conducted exhaustive evaluations through the enormous experiments, and we hope our empirical observations and recommendations help the practitioners to explore the explosive configuration space. Adam Adam Learning rate (policy) 1e-4 5e-5 3e-4 3e-4 Learning rate (value) 1e-4 1e-2 3e-4 3e-4 Weight initialization Uniform Xavier Uniform Xavier Uniform Xavier Uniform Initial output scale (policy) 1.0 1e-4 1e-2 1e-2 Target update Hard - Soft (5e-3) Soft (5e-3) Clipped Double QFalse - True True Table 7: Details of each network architecture. We refer the original implementations of each algorithm which is available online [23, 14, 48, 27, 42].