{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/barcodes-as-summary-of-objective-functions-1","title":"Barcodes as Summary of Loss Function Topology","arxiv_id":"1912.00043","date":"2019-11-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Serguei Barannikov","Alexander Korotin","Dmitry Oganesyan","Daniil Emtsev","Evgeny Burnaev"],"abstract":"We propose to study neural networks' loss surfaces by methods of topological data analysis. We suggest to apply barcodes of Morse complexes to explore topology of loss surfaces. An algorithm for calculations of the loss function's barcodes of local minima is described. We have conducted experiments for calculating barcodes of local minima for benchmark functions and for loss surfaces of small neural networks. Our experiments confirm our two principal observations for neural networks' loss surfaces. First, the barcodes of local minima are located in a small lower part of the range of values of neural networks' loss function. Secondly, increase of the neural network's depth and width lowers the barcodes of local minima. This has some natural implications for the neural network's learning and for its generalization properties.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.00043v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.00043v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"barcodes-as-summary-of-objective-functions-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/grag90/barcodecalc","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"topological-data-analysis","task_name":"Topological Data Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/1912.00043","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1912.00043","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}