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Theory III: Dynamics and Generalization in Deep Networks

The key to generalization is controlling the complexity of the network. However, there is no obvious control of complexity -- such as an explicit regularization term -- in the training of deep networks for classification. We will show that a classical form of norm control -- but kind of hidden -- is present in deep networks trained with gradient descent techniques on exponential-type losses. In particular, gradient descent induces a dynamics of the normalized weights which converge for $t \to \infty$ to an equilibrium which corresponds to a minimum norm (or maximum margin) solution. For sufficiently large but finite $ρ$ -- and thus finite $t$ -- the dynamics converges to one of several margin maximizers, with the margin monotonically increasing towards a limit stationary point of the flow. In the usual case of stochastic gradient descent, most of the stationary points are likely to be convex minima corresponding to a constrained minimizer -- the network with normalized weights-- which corresponds to vanishing regularization. The solution has zero generalization gap, for fixed architecture, asymptotically for $N \to \infty$, where $N$ is the number of training examples. Our approach extends some of the original results of Srebro from linear networks to deep networks and provides a new perspective on the implicit bias of gradient descent. We believe that the elusive complexity control we describe is responsible for the puzzling empirical finding of good predictive performance by deep networks, despite overparametrization.