Empirical Phase Diagram for Three-layer Neural Networks with Infinite Width

Substantial work indicates that the dynamics of neural networks (NNs) is closely related to their initialization of parameters. Inspired by the phase diagram for two-layer ReLU NNs with infinite width (Luo et al., 2021), we make a step towards drawing a phase diagram for three-layer ReLU NNs with infinite width. First, we derive a normalized gradient flow for three-layer ReLU NNs and obtain two key independent quantities to distinguish different dynamical regimes for common initialization methods. With carefully designed experiments and a large computation cost, for both synthetic datasets and real datasets, we find that the dynamics of each layer also could be divided into a linear regime and a condensed regime, separated by a critical regime. The criteria is the relative change of input weights (the input weight of a hidden neuron consists of the weight from its input layer to the hidden neuron and its bias term) as the width approaches infinity during the training, which tends to 0, +∞ and O(1), respectively. In addition, we also demonstrate that different layers can lie in different dynamical regimes in a training process within a deep NN. In the condensed regime, we also observe the condensation of weights in isolated orientations with low complexity. Through experiments under three-layer condition, our phase diagram suggests a complicated dynamical regimes consisting of three possible regimes, together with their mixture, for deep NNs and provides a guidance for studying deep NNs in different initialization regimes, which reveals the possibility of completely different dynamics emerging within a deep NN for its different layers.