Due to the non-convex nature of training Deep Neural Network (DNN) models, their effectiveness relies on the use of non-convex optimization heuristics. Traditional methods for training DNNs often require costly empirical methods to produce successful models and do not have a clear theoretical foundation. In this study, we examine the use of convex optimization theory and sparse recovery models to refine the training process of neural networks and provide a better interpretation of their optimal weights. We focus on training two-layer neural networks with piecewise linear activations and demonstrate that they can be formulated as a finite-dimensional convex program. These programs include a regularization term that promotes sparsity, which constitutes a variant of group Lasso. We first utilize semi-infinite programming theory to prove strong duality for finite width neural networks and then we express these architectures equivalently as high dimensional convex sparse recovery models. Remarkably, the worst-case complexity to solve the convex program is polynomial in the number of samples and number of neurons when the rank of the data matrix is bounded, which is the case in convolutional networks. To extend our method to training data of arbitrary rank, we develop a novel polynomial-time approximation scheme based on zonotope subsampling that comes with a guaranteed approximation ratio. We also show that all the stationary of the nonconvex training objective can be characterized as the global optimum of a subsampled convex program. Our convex models can be trained using standard convex solvers without resorting to heuristics or extensive hyper-parameter tuning unlike non-convex methods. Through extensive numerical experiments, we show that convex models can outperform traditional non-convex methods and are not sensitive to optimizer hyperparameters.

通过使用凸优化理论和稀疏恢复模型来改进神经网络的训练过程，并对其最优权重提供更好的解释，我们的研究侧重于以分段线性激活函数构建的两层神经网络的训练，证明了这些网络可以表达为一个有限维的凸规划问题，其中包括促使稀疏性的正则化项，构成Lasso的变种。通过大量的数值实验，我们展示了凸模型可以胜过传统非凸方法，并且对于优化器的超参数并不敏感。

神经网络的凸优化景观：通过Lasso模型表征全局最优和稳定点