201 research outputs found
Non-attracting Regions of Local Minima in Deep and Wide Neural Networks
Understanding the loss surface of neural networks is essential for the design
of models with predictable performance and their success in applications.
Experimental results suggest that sufficiently deep and wide neural networks
are not negatively impacted by suboptimal local minima. Despite recent
progress, the reason for this outcome is not fully understood. Could deep
networks have very few, if at all, suboptimal local optima? or could all of
them be equally good? We provide a construction to show that suboptimal local
minima (i.e., non-global ones), even though degenerate, exist for fully
connected neural networks with sigmoid activation functions. The local minima
obtained by our construction belong to a connected set of local solutions that
can be escaped from via a non-increasing path on the loss curve. For extremely
wide neural networks of decreasing width after the wide layer, we prove that
every suboptimal local minimum belongs to such a connected set. This provides a
partial explanation for the successful application of deep neural networks. In
addition, we also characterize under what conditions the same construction
leads to saddle points instead of local minima for deep neural networks
Generalized Boundaries from Multiple Image Interpretations
Boundary detection is essential for a variety of computer vision tasks such
as segmentation and recognition. In this paper we propose a unified formulation
and a novel algorithm that are applicable to the detection of different types
of boundaries, such as intensity edges, occlusion boundaries or object category
specific boundaries. Our formulation leads to a simple method with
state-of-the-art performance and significantly lower computational cost than
existing methods. We evaluate our algorithm on different types of boundaries,
from low-level boundaries extracted in natural images, to occlusion boundaries
obtained using motion cues and RGB-D cameras, to boundaries from
soft-segmentation. We also propose a novel method for figure/ground
soft-segmentation that can be used in conjunction with our boundary detection
method and improve its accuracy at almost no extra computational cost
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