Paper:
A recent line of work has studied the statistical properties of neural networks to great success from a mean field theory perspective, making and verifying very precise predictions of neural network behavior and test time performance. In this paper, we build upon these works to explore two methods for taming the behaviors of random residual networks (with only fully connected layers and no batchnorm). The first method is width variation (WV), i.e. varying the widths of layers as a function of depth. We show that width decay reduces gradient explosion without affecting the mean forward dynamics of the random network. The second method is variance variation (VV), i.e. changing the initialization variances of weights and biases over depth. We show VV, used appropriately, can reduce gradient explosion of tanh and ReLU resnets from exp(Θ( √ L)) and exp(Θ(L)) respectively to constant Θ(1). A complete phase-diagram is derived for how variance decay affects different dynamics, such as those of gradient and activation norms. In particular, we show the existence of many phase transitions where these dynamics switch between exponential, polynomial, logarithmic, and even constant behaviors. Using the obtained mean field theory, we are able to track surprisingly well how VV at initialization time affects training and test time performance on MNIST after a set number of epochs: the level sets of test/train set accuracies coincide with the level sets of the expectations of certain gradient norms or of metric expressivity (as defined in Yang and Schoenholz (2017)), a measure of expansion in a random neural network. Based on insights from past works in deep mean field theory and information geometry, we also provide a new perspective on the gradient explosion/vanishing problems: they lead to ill-conditioning of the Fisher information matrix, causing optimization troubles.

Review:
Mean field theory is an approach to analysing complex systems where correlations between highly dependent random variables are ignored, thus making the problem analytically tractable. It is hoped that analytical insights gained in this idealised setting might translate back to the original (and far messier) problem. The authors use a mean field theory approach to study how varying certain network hyperparameters with depth can effect gradient and activation statistics. A correlation between the behaviour of these statistics and training performance on MNIST is noted.
As someone asked to conduct an 'emergency' review of this paper, I would have greatly appreciated the authors making more of an effort to present their results clearly. Some general comments in this regard:
Clarity issues:
- the authors appear to have ignored the ICLR style guidelines
- the references are all written in green, making them difficult to read
- figures are either missing color maps or make poor choice of colors
- the figure captions are difficult to understand in isolation from the main text
- the authors themselves appear to muddle their 'zigs' and 'zags' (first line of discussion)
Now to get to the actual content of the paper. The authors do not properly place their work in context. Mean field theory has been studied in the context of neural networks at least since the 80's. Entire books have been written on the statistical mechanics of neural networks. It seems wrong that the authors only cite papers on this matter going back to 2016.
With that said, the main thrust of the paper is very interesting. The authors derive recurrence relations for mean activations and gradients. They show how scaling layer width and initialisation variance with depth can better control the propagation of these means. The results of their calculations appear to match their random network simulations, and this part of the work seems strong.
What is not clear is what effect we should expect these quantities to have on learning? The authors claim there is a tradeoff between expressivity and exploding gradients. This seems quite speculative since it is not clear to me what effect either of these things will have on training. For one, how expressive does a model need to be to correctly classify MNIST? And are exploding gradients necessarily a bad thing? Provided they do not reach infinity, can we not just choose a smaller learning rate?
I'm open to reevaluating the review if the issues of clarity and missing literature review are fixed.