While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1) representation power of deep networks 2) optimization of the empirical risk 3) generalization properties of gradient descent techniques --- why the expected error does not suffer, despite the absence of explicit regularization, when the networks are overparametrized? In this review we discuss recent advances in the three areas. In approximation theory both shallow and deep networks have been shown to approximate any continuous functions on a bounded domain at the expense of an exponential number of parameters (exponential in the dimensionality of the function). However, for a subset of compositional functions, deep networks of the convolutional type can have a linear dependence on dimensionality, unlike shallow networks. In optimization we discuss the loss landscape for the exponential loss function and show that stochastic gradient descent will find with high probability the global minima. To address the question of generalization for classification tasks, we use classical uniform convergence results to justify minimizing a surrogate exponential-type loss function under a unit norm constraint on the weight matrix at each layer -- since the interesting variables for classification are the weight directions rather than the weights. Our approach, which is supported by several independent new results, offers a solution to the puzzle about generalization performance of deep overparametrized ReLU networks, uncovering the origin of the underlying hidden complexity control.

简述：对深度学习的理论研究逐渐深入，从表示能力到优化、从梯度下降的泛化性质到固有隐藏复杂性的到达方式，已经有了一些解释;通过在分类任务中使用经典的均匀收敛结果，我们证明了在每个层的权重矩阵上施加单位范数约束下最小化替代指数型损失函数的有效性，从而解决了与深度网络泛化性能相关的一些谜团。

深度网络中的理论问题：逼近、优化和泛化