One of the mystery in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies this surprising phenomenon for two-layer fully connected ReLU activated neural networks. For an $m$ hidden node shallow neural network with ReLU activation and $n$ training data, we show as long as $m$ is large enough and the data is non-degenerate, randomly initialized gradient descent converges a globally optimal solution with a linear convergence rate for the quadratic loss function. Our analysis is based on the following observation: over-parameterization and random initialization jointly restrict every weight vector to be close to its initialization for all iterations, which allows us to exploit a strong convexity-like property to show that gradient descent converges at a global linear rate to the global optimum. We believe these insights are also useful in analyzing deep models and other first order methods.

本文研究表明，在神经网络中使用ReLU激活函数和随机初始化梯度下降法可以以全局线性收敛率收敛于全局最优解，其分析依赖于神经网络的超参数和随机初始化方式，这些经验也可能有助于分析深度网络等其他一阶方法。

梯度下降证明过参数化神经网络的最优化