Fast Convergence in Learning Two-Layer Neural Networks with Separable Data
Normalized gradient descent has shown substantial success in speeding up the convergence of exponentially-tailed loss functions (which includes exponential and logistic losses) on linear classifiers with separable data. In this paper, we go beyond linear models by studying normalized GD on two-layer neural nets. We prove for exponentially-tailed losses that using normalized GD leads to linear rate of convergence of the training loss to the global optimum. This is made possible by showing certain gradient self-boundedness conditions and a log-Lipschitzness property. We also study generalization of normalized GD for convex objectives via an algorithmic-stability analysis. In particular, we show that normalized GD does not overfit during training by establishing finite-time generalization bounds.
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