Infinitely Deep Infinite-Width Networks
Authors: Jovana Mitrovic, Peter Wirnsberger, Charles Blundell, Dino Sejdinovic, Yee Whye Teh
Keywords: Infinite-width networks, initialisation, kernel methods, reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, Gaussian processes
TL;DR: We propose a method for the construction of arbitrarily deep infinite-width networks, based on which we derive a novel weight initialisation scheme for finite-width networks and demonstrate its competitive performance.
Abstract: Infinite-width neural networks have been extensively used to study the theoretical properties underlying the extraordinary empirical success of standard, finite-width neural networks. Nevertheless, until now, infinite-width networks have been limited to at most two hidden layers. To address this shortcoming, we study the initialisation requirements of these networks and show that the main challenge for constructing them is defining the appropriate sampling distributions for the weights. Based on these observations, we propose a principled approach to weight initialisation that correctly accounts for the functional nature of the hidden layer activations and facilitates the construction of arbitrarily many infinite-width layers, thus enabling the construction of arbitrarily deep infinite-width networks. The main idea of our approach is to iteratively reparametrise the hidden-layer activations into appropriately defined reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces and use the canonical way of constructing probability distributions over these spaces for specifying the required weight distributions in a principled way. Furthermore, we examine the practical implications of this construction for standard, finite-width networks. In particular, we derive a novel weight initialisation scheme for standard, finite-width networks that takes into account the structure of the data and information about the task at hand. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this weight initialisation approach on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and Year Prediction MSD datasets.