Analytic Study of Families of Spurious Minima in Two-Layer ReLU Neural Networks: A Tale of Symmetry II

We study the optimization problem associated with fitting two-layer ReLU neural networks with respect to the squared loss, where labels are generated by a target network. We make use of the rich symmetry structure to develop a novel set of tools for studying families of spurious minima. In contrast to existing approaches which operate in limiting regimes, our technique directly addresses the nonconvex loss landscape for a finite number of inputs d and neurons k, and provides analytic, rather than heuristic, information.