One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern deep learning systems is that they typically employ neural network architectures that utilize enormous numbers of parameters, often in the millions and sometimes even in the billions. While this paradigm has inspired significant research on the properties of large networks, relatively little work has been devoted to the fact that these networks are often used to model large complex datasets, which may themselves contain millions or even billions of constraints. In this work, we focus on this high-dimensional regime in which both the dataset size and the number of features tend to infinity. We analyze the performance of a simple regression model trained on the random features F = f (W X + B) for a random weight matrix W and random bias vector B, obtaining an exact formula for the asymptotic training error on a noisy autoencoding task. The role of the bias can be understood as parameterizing a distribution over activation functions, and our analysis directly generalizes to such distributions, even those not expressible with a traditional additive bias. Intriguingly, we find that a mixture of nonlinearities can outperform the best single nonlinearity on the noisy autoecndoing task, suggesting that mixtures of nonlinearities might be useful for approximate kernel methods or neural network architecture design.
This paper investigates the asymptotic spectral density of a random feature model F(Wx + B).  This is an extension of existing result that analyzed a model without the bias term, i.e., F(WX). This extension requires a modification of the proof technique. In addition to that, it analyzed a mixture of linear and non-linear activation functions, and show that mixture is better than single nonlinearity in terms of expected training error for ridge regression estimators.
Pros:
- This paper investigates an interesting problem and it successfully extends the existing work. The theoretical curve well matches the simulated curve.
- The finding that mixture of nonlinearities gives better expected training error is interesting.
Cons:
- The extension to the model with bias seems a bit incremental. In practice, we may consider an input with additional constant feature, X <- [X,1], to deal with both models in a unified manner. There should be more discussion about why this kind of trivial argument cannot be applied in the analysis.
- The effect of mixture of activation functions is investigated in the "training error," but I don't see much significance on investigating the training error thoroughly. Instead, people are interested in the test error. I guess there does not appear such a trade-off for the test error and the linear activation function would be always better because the true function is the linear model. Hence, more expositions about why the training error is investigated should be provided.
More minor comment:
- I guess the definition of Etrain  (Eq.(17)) requires an expectation with respect to the training data.
- Assumptions of the activation function f should be provided; is it just assumed to be differentiable?, ReLU is included?
- The definition of G(\gamma) in page 6 had better to be consistent to that in previous pages.