Despite the widespread practical success of deep learning methods, our theoretical understanding of the dynamics of learning in deep neural networks remains quite sparse. We attempt to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of deep learning by systematically analyzing learning dynamics for the restricted case of deep linear neural networks. Despite the linearity of their input-output map, such networks have nonlinear gradient descent dynamics on weights that change with the addition of each new hidden layer. We show that deep linear networks exhibit nonlinear learning phenomena similar to those seen in simulations of nonlinear networks, including long plateaus followed by rapid transitions to lower error solutions, and faster convergence from greedy unsupervised pretraining initial conditions than from random initial conditions. We provide an analytical description of these phenomena by finding new exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of deep learning. Our theoretical analysis also reveals the surprising finding that as the depth of a network approaches infinity, learning speed remains finite: for a special class of initial conditions on the weights, very deep networks incur only a finite delay in learning speed relative to shallow networks. We further show that, under certain conditions on the training data, unsupervised pretraining can find this special class of initial conditions, thereby providing analytical insight into the success of unsupervised pretraining in deep supervised learning tasks.

通过对深度线性神经网络的学习动态进行系统分析，我们发现这些网络表现出类似于非线性神经网络的非线性学习现象，包括长时间的平原，然后快速转换到更低误差的解决方案，以及从贪婪的无监督预训练初始条件下的更快收敛等。同时，我们发现在权重的某些特殊初始条件下，非监督预训练可以找到这些初始条件，同时表现出深度独立的学习时间，而随机高斯初始化则做不到。

深度线性神经网络学习非线性动力学的精确解