There are many surprising and perhaps counter-intuitive properties of optimization of deep neural networks. We propose and experimentally verify a unified phenomenological model of the loss landscape that incorporates many of them. High dimensionality plays a key role in our model. Our core idea is to model the loss landscape as a set of high dimensional \emph{wedges} that together form a large-scale, inter-connected structure and towards which optimization is drawn. We first show that hyperparameter choices such as learning rate, network width and $L_2$ regularization, affect the path optimizer takes through the landscape in a similar ways, influencing the large scale curvature of the regions the optimizer explores. Finally, we predict and demonstrate new counter-intuitive properties of the loss-landscape. We show an existence of low loss subspaces connecting a set (not only a pair) of solutions, and verify it experimentally. Finally, we analyze recently popular ensembling techniques for deep networks in the light of our model.

本文通过一个统一的现象学模型来解释深度神经网络优化过程中的一些令人惊讶、或者说是违反直觉的特性，其中高维度发挥了关键作用，通过将损失函数的空间看作是一系列高维楔形图的集合，揭示了优化算法收敛过程的内在规律，最终还研究了一些深度网络的集成技术。

神经网络损失函数的大尺度结构