Natural gradient descent has proven effective at mitigating the effects of pathological curvature in neural network optimization, but little is known theoretically about its convergence properties, especially for \emph{nonlinear} networks. In this work, we analyze \emph{for the first time} the speed of convergence for natural gradient descent on nonlinear neural networks with the squared-error loss. We identify two conditions which guarantee the efficient convergence from random initializations: (1) the Jacobian matrix (of network's output for all training cases with respect to the parameters) is full row rank, and (2) the Jacobian matrix is stable for small perturbations around the initialization. For two-layer ReLU neural networks (i.e., with one hidden layer), we prove that these two conditions do in fact hold throughout the training, under the assumptions of nondegenerate inputs and overparameterization. We further extend our analysis to more general loss functions. Lastly, we show that K-FAC, an approximate natural gradient descent method, also converges to global minima under the same assumptions.

本文首次分析了自然梯度下降在非线性神经网络中的收敛速度，发现若序列导数矩阵显满秩且在初始化附近稳定，则该方法在随机初始化时就能快速收敛。对于深度 ReLU 神经网络，作者在过度参数化及输入非退化的条件下论证了这两个条件在训练期间均得以保持，并将分析拓展到其他损失函数，同时说明使用 K-FAC 近似方法也能在相同条件下达到全局最小值。

超参数神经网络的自然梯度下降快速收敛