The role of over-parametrization in generalization of neural networks

Behnam Neyshabur, Zhiyuan Li, Srinadh Bhojanapalli, Yann LeCun, Nathan Srebro

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Despite existing work on ensuring generalization of neural networks in terms of scale sensitive complexity measures, such as norms, margin and sharpness, these complexity measures do not offer an explanation of why neural networks generalize better with over-parametrization. In this work we suggest a novel complexity measure based on unit-wise capacities resulting in a tighter generalization bound for two layer ReLU networks. Our capacity bound correlates with the behavior of test error with increasing network sizes (within the range reported in the experiments), and could partly explain the improvement in generalization with over-parametrization. We further present a matching lower bound for the Rademacher complexity that improves over previous capacity lower bounds for neural networks.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - Jan 1 2019
Event7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: May 6 2019May 9 2019

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2019
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period5/6/195/9/19

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Education
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Language and Linguistics

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