Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a key ingredient in the training of deep neural networks and yet its geometrical significance appears elusive. We study a deterministic model in which the trajectories of our dynamical systems are described via geodesics of a family of metrics arising from the diffusion matrix. These metrics encode information about the highly non-isotropic gradient noise in SGD. We establish a parallel with General Relativity models, where the role of the electromagnetic field is played by the gradient of the loss function. We compute an example of a two layer network.

We consider the problem of constructing diffusion operators high dimensional data $X$ to address counterfactual functions $F$, such as individualized treatment effectiveness. We propose and construct a new diffusion metric $K_F$ that captures both the local geometry of $X$ and the directions of variance of $F$. The resulting diffusion metric is then used to define a localized filtration of $F$ and answer counterfactual questions pointwise, particularly in situations such as drug trials where an individual patient's outcomes cannot be studied long term both taking and not taking a medication. We validate the model on synthetic and real world clinical trials, and create individualized notions of benefit from treatment.