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Poster
Implicit Regularization of Discrete Gradient Dynamics in Linear Neural Networks
Gauthier Gidel · Francis Bach · Simon Lacoste-Julien

Tue Dec 10 05:30 PM -- 07:30 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #89

When optimizing over-parameterized models, such as deep neural networks, a large set of parameters can achieve zero training error. In such cases, the choice of the optimization algorithm and its respective hyper-parameters introduces biases that will lead to convergence to specific minimizers of the objective. Consequently, this choice can be considered as an implicit regularization for the training of over-parametrized models. In this work, we push this idea further by studying the discrete gradient dynamics of the training of a two-layer linear network with the least-squares loss. Using a time rescaling, we show that, with a vanishing initialization and a small enough step size, this dynamics sequentially learns the solutions of a reduced-rank regression with a gradually increasing rank.

Author Information

Gauthier Gidel (Mila)

I am a Ph.D student supervised by Simon Lacoste-Julien, I graduated from ENS Ulm and Université Paris-Saclay. I was a visiting PhD student at Sierra. I also worked for 6 months as a freelance Data Scientist for Monsieur Drive (Acquired by Criteo) and I recently co-founded a startup called Krypto. I'm currently pursuing my PhD at Mila. My work focuses on optimization applied to machine learning. More details can be found in my resume. My research is to develop new optimization algorithms and understand the role of optimization in the learning procedure, in short, learn faster and better. I identify to the field of machine learning (NIPS, ICML, AISTATS and ICLR) and optimization (SIAM OP)

Francis Bach (INRIA - Ecole Normale Superieure)
Simon Lacoste-Julien (Mila, Université de Montréal & SAIL Montreal)

Simon Lacoste-Julien is an associate professor at Mila and DIRO from Université de Montréal, and Canada CIFAR AI Chair holder. He also heads part time the SAIT AI Lab Montreal from Samsung. His research interests are machine learning and applied math, with applications in related fields like computer vision and natural language processing. He obtained a B.Sc. in math., physics and computer science from McGill, a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley and a post-doc from the University of Cambridge. He spent a few years as a research faculty at INRIA and École normale supérieure in Paris before coming back to his roots in Montreal in 2016 to answer the call from Yoshua Bengio in growing the Montreal AI ecosystem.

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