🤖 AI Summary
研究通过探索神经网络损失景观中的模式连接现象，以理解其优化过程和特征学习多样性，从而解决对神经网络决策机制理解不足的问题。
📝 Abstract
Over the course of the last decade, neural networks have grown from an academic curiosity to moving the markets of nations. Despite this explosion in both research and deployment, relatively little is understood about how they achieve the solutions they do. This is both scientifically relevant, and pressing for society. When neural networks make decisions across self-driving, construction, law, hiring and health, there have been and will continue to be unintended consequences.
However, attempting to generalize the failures of the largest and most important production systems makes for a very difficult task. Yet signs of these failures exist at all scales of neural networks, so we should be able to study a much more tractable setting. All neural networks must undergo an optimization process, called training, to be useful. To a great degree, understanding neural networks is understanding their optimization: through what process and exposure to which data did they arrive at their results. Yet our knowledge on this topic as a field is quite imprecise. In particular, a curious phenomenon called mode connectivity, the ability to connect neural networks in the loss surface, defies explanation entirely.
This dissertation elucidates, explains and exploits this special structure in the loss landscape...