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  • Implicit Convex Regularizers of CNN Architectures: Convex Optimization of Two- and Three-Layer Networks in Polynomial Time
Title: Implicit Convex Regularizers of CNN Architectures: Convex Optimization of Two- and Three-Layer Networks in Polynomial Time
We study training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with ReLU activations and introduce exact convex optimization formulations with a polynomial complexity with respect to the number of data samples, the number of neurons, and data dimension. More specifically, we develop a convex analytic framework utilizing semi-infinite duality to obtain equivalent convex optimization problems for several two- and three-layer CNN architectures. We first prove that two-layer CNNs can be globally optimized via an `2 norm regularized convex program. We then show that multi-layer circular CNN training problems with a single ReLU layer are equivalent to an `1 regularized convex program that encourages sparsity in the spectral domain. We also extend these results to three-layer CNNs with two ReLU layers. Furthermore, we present extensions of our approach to different pooling methods, which elucidates the implicit architectural bias as convex regularizers.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1838179
NSF-PAR ID:
10310558
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2021
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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