Depth with Nonlinearity Creates No Bad Local Minima in ResNets

Abstract

In this paper, we prove that depth with nonlinearity creates no bad local minima in a type of arbitrarily deep ResNets studied in previous work, in the sense that the values of all local minima are no worse than the global minima values of corresponding shallow linear predictors with arbitrary fixed features, and are guaranteed to further improve via residual representations. As a result, this paper provides an affirmative answer to an open question stated in a paper in the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2018. We note that even though our paper advances the theoretical foundation of deep learning and non-convex optimization, there is still a gap between theory and many practical deep learning applications.