Learning Deep Models: Critical Points and Local Openness

With the increasing popularity of non-convex deep models, developing a unifying theory for studying the optimization problems that arise from training these models becomes very significant. Toward this end, we present in this paper a unifying landscape analysis framework that can be used when the training objective function is the composite of simple functions. Using the local openness property of the underlying training models, we provide simple sufficient conditions under which any local optimum of the resulting optimization problem is globally optimal. We first completely characterize the local openness of the symmetric and non-symmetric matrix multiplication mapping . Then we use our characterization to: 1) provide a simple proof for the classical result of Burer-Monteiro and extend it to non-continuous loss functions. 2) Show that every local optimum of two layer linear networks is globally optimal. Unlike many existing results in the literature, our result requires no assumption on the target data matrix Y, and input data matrix X. 3) Develop a complete characterization of the local/global optima equivalence of multi-layer linear neural networks. We provide various counterexamples to show the necessity of each of our assumptions. 4) Show global/local optima equivalence of over-parameterized non-linear deep models having a certain pyramidal structure. In contrast to existing works, our result requires no assumption on the differentiability of the activation functions and can go beyond "full-rank" cases.