Gradient Descent Finds Global Minima for Generalizable Deep Neural Networks of Practical Sizes

Abstract: In this paper, we theoretically prove that gradient descent can find a global minimum of non-convex optimization of all layers for nonlinear deep neural networks of sizes commonly encountered in practice. The theory developed in this paper only requires the practical degrees of over-parameterization unlike previous theories. Our theory only requires the number of trainable parameters to increase linearly as the number of training samples increases. This allows the size of the deep neural networks to be consistent with practice and to be several orders of magnitude smaller than that required by the previous theories. Moreover, we prove that the linear increase of the size of the network is the optimal rate and that it cannot be improved, except by a logarithmic factor. Furthermore, deep neural networks with the trainability guarantee are shown to generalize well to unseen test samples with a natural dataset but not a random dataset.