title: Effects of Data Geometry in Early Deep Learning
abstract: Deep neural networks can approximate functions on different types of data, from images to graphs, with varied underlying structure.This underlying structure can be viewed as the geometry of the data manifold. By extending recent advances in the theoretical understanding of neural networks, we study how a randomly initialized neural network with piecewise linear activation splits the data manifold into regions where the neural network behaves as a linear function. We derive bounds on the number of linear regions and the distance to boundaries of these linear regions on the data manifold. This leads to insights into the expressivity of randomly initialized deep neural networks on non-Euclidean data sets. We empirically corroborate our theoretical results using a toy supervised learning problem. Our experiments demonstrate that number of linear regions varies across manifolds and how our results hold upon changing neural network architectures. We further demonstrate how the complexity of linear regions changes on the low dimensional manifold of images as training progresses, using the MetFaces dataset.
authors: Saket Tiwari George Konidaris
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