The Quenching-Activation Behavior of the Gradient Descent Dynamics for Two-layer Neural Network Models

Abstract: A numerical and phenomenological study of the gradient descent (GD) algorithm for training two-layer neural network models is carried out for different parameter regimes when the target function can be accurately approximated by a relatively small number of neurons. It is found that for Xavier-like initialization, there are two distinctive phases in the dynamic behavior of GD in the under-parametrized regime: An early phase in which the GD dynamics follows closely that of the corresponding random feature model and the neurons are effectively quenched, followed by a late phase in which the neurons are divided into two groups: a group of a few "activated" neurons that dominate the dynamics and a group of background (or "quenched") neurons that support the continued activation and deactivation process. This neural network-like behavior is continued into the mildly over-parametrized regime, where it undergoes a transition to a random feature-like behavior. The quenching-activation process seems to provide a clear mechanism for "implicit regularization". This is qualitatively different from the dynamics associated with the "mean-field" scaling where all neurons participate equally and there does not appear to be qualitative changes when the network parameters are changed.