Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Robustness in deep learning: The good (width), the bad (depth), and the ugly (initialization)

Zhenyu Zhu · Fanghui Liu · Grigorios Chrysos · Volkan Cevher

Hall J (level 1) #834

Keywords: [ robustness ] [ over-parameterized model ] [ initialization scheme ] [ perturbation stability ]


Abstract:

We study the average robustness notion in deep neural networks in (selected) wide and narrow, deep and shallow, as well as lazy and non-lazy training settings. We prove that in the under-parameterized setting, width has a negative effect while it improves robustness in the over-parameterized setting. The effect of depth closely depends on the initialization and the training mode. In particular, when initialized with LeCun initialization, depth helps robustness with the lazy training regime. In contrast, when initialized with Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) and He-initialization, depth hurts the robustness. Moreover, under the non-lazy training regime, we demonstrate how the width of a two-layer ReLU network benefits robustness. Our theoretical developments improve the results by [Huang et al. NeurIPS21; Wu et al. NeurIPS21] and are consistent with [Bubeck and Sellke NeurIPS21; Bubeck et al. COLT21].

Chat is not available.