Papers › On the distance between two neural networks and the stability of learning

On the distance between two neural networks and the stability of learning

9 Feb 2020NeurIPS 2020 12arXiv:2002.03432archive 2025-07-28

Jeremy Bernstein, Arash Vahdat, Yisong Yue, Ming-Yu Liu

This paper relates parameter distance to gradient breakdown for a broad class of nonlinear compositional functions. The analysis leads to a new distance function called deep relative trust and a descent lemma for neural networks. Since the resulting learning rule seems to require little to no learning rate tuning, it may unlock a simpler workflow for training deeper and more complex neural networks. The Python code used in this paper is here: https://github.com/jxbz/fromage.

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Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSGDSoftmaxTransformer

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