Outline. This section shows that second order derivatives of the output function vanish during flat minimum search. This justifies the linear approximations in section 4.
Intuition. We show that the algorithm tends to suppress the following values: (1) unit activations, (2) first order activation derivatives, (3) the sum of all contributions of an arbitrary unit activation to the net output. Since weights, inputs, activation functions, and their first and second order derivatives are bounded, the entries in the Hessian decrease where the corresponding increase.
Formal details. We consider a strictly layered feedforward network with output units and layers. We use the same activation function for all units. For simplicity, in what follows we focus on a single input vector . (and occasionally itself) will be notationally suppressed. We have
The last term of equation (1) (the ``regulator'') expresses output sensitivity (to be minimized) with respect to simultaneous perturbations of all weights. ``Regulation'' is done by equalizing the sensitivity of the output units with respect to the weights. The ``regulator'' does not influence the same particular units or weights for each training example. It may be ignored for the purposes of this section. Of course, the same holds for the first (constant) term in (1). We are left with the second term. With (34) we obtain:
Let us have a closer look at this equation. We observe:
(1) Activations of units decrease in proportion
to their fan-outs.
(2) First order derivatives of the activation functions
decrease in proportion to their fan-ins.
(3) A term of the form
expresses the sum of
unit 's
squared contributions
to the net output.
Here ranges over
,
and unit is in the th layer
(for the special case ,
we get
).
These terms also decrease
in proportion to unit 's fan-in.
Analogously,
equation (35) can be extended to the case of additional layers.
Comment. Let us assume that and is ``difficult to achieve'' (can be achieved only by fine-tuning all weights on connections to unit ). Instead of minimizing or by adjusting the net input of unit (this requires fine-tuning of many weights), our algorithm prefers pushing weights on connections to output units towards zero (other weights are less affected). On the other hand, if and is not ``difficult to achieve'', then, unlike weight decay, our algorithm does not necessarily prefer weights close to zero. Instead, it prefers (possibly very strong) weights which push or towards zero (e.g., with sigmoid units active in [0,1]: strong inhibitory weights are preferred; with Gaussian units: high absolute weight values are preferred). See the experiment in section 5.2.
How does this influence the Hessian?
The entries in the Hessian corresponding to
output can be written as follows:
According to the analysis above, the first order derivatives in the second term of (36) are pushed towards zero. So are the of the sum in the second term of (36).
The only remaining expressions of interest are second order derivatives of units in layer . The are bounded if (a) the weights, (b) the activation functions, (c) their first and second order derivatives, and (d) the inputs are bounded. This is indeed the case, as will be shown for networks with one or two hidden layers:
Case 1: For unit in a single hidden layer (), we obtain
Case 2: For unit in the third layer of a net with 2 hidden layers (), we obtain
Conclusion: As desired, our algorithm makes the decrease where or increase.