Deep Architecture Connectivity Matters for Its Convergence: A Fine-Grained Analysis

Wuyang Chen, Wei Huang, Xinyu Gong, Boris Hanin, Zhangyang Wang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Advanced deep neural networks (DNNs), designed by either human or AutoML algorithms, are growing increasingly complex. Diverse operations are connected by complicated connectivity patterns, e.g., various types of skip connections. Those topological compositions are empirically effective and observed to smooth the loss landscape and facilitate the gradient flow in general. However, it remains elusive to derive any principled understanding of their effects on the DNN capacity or trainability, and to understand why or in which aspect one specific connectivity pattern is better than another. In this work, we theoretically characterize the impact of connectivity patterns on the convergence of DNNs under gradient descent training in fine granularity. By analyzing a wide network's Neural Network Gaussian Process (NNGP), we are able to depict how the spectrum of an NNGP kernel propagates through a particular connectivity pattern, and how that affects the bound of convergence rates. As one practical implication of our results, we show that by a simple filtration on “unpromising" connectivity patterns, we can trim down the number of models to evaluate, and significantly accelerate the large-scale neural architecture search without any overhead. Code is available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/architecture_convergence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 - 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022
EditorsS. Koyejo, S. Mohamed, A. Agarwal, D. Belgrave, K. Cho, A. Oh
PublisherNeural information processing systems foundation
ISBN (Electronic)9781713871088
StatePublished - 2022
Event36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Nov 28 2022Dec 9 2022

Publication series

NameAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume35
ISSN (Print)1049-5258

Conference

Conference36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period11/28/2212/9/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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