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Fast Convex Optimization for Two-Layer ReLU Networks: Equivalent Model Classes and Cone Decompositions

2 Feb 2022arXiv:2202.01331archive 2025-07-28

Aaron Mishkin, Arda Sahiner, Mert Pilanci

We develop fast algorithms and robust software for convex optimization of two-layer neural networks with ReLU activation functions. Our work leverages a convex reformulation of the standard weight-decay penalized training problem as a set of group-ℓ₁-regularized data-local models, where locality is enforced by polyhedral cone constraints. In the special case of zero-regularization, we show that this problem is exactly equivalent to unconstrained optimization of a convex "gated ReLU" network. For problems with non-zero regularization, we show that convex gated ReLU models obtain data-dependent approximation bounds for the ReLU training problem. To optimize the convex reformulations, we develop an accelerated proximal gradient method and a practical augmented Lagrangian solver. We show that these approaches are faster than standard training heuristics for the non-convex problem, such as SGD, and outperform commercial interior-point solvers. Experimentally, we verify our theoretical results, explore the group-ℓ₁ regularization path, and scale convex optimization for neural networks to image classification on MNIST and CIFAR-10.

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