Local Geometry of One-Hidden-Layer Neural Networks for Logistic Regression

We study the local geometry of a one-hidden-layer fully-connected neural network where the training samples are generated from a multi-neuron logistic regression model. We prove that under Gaussian input, the empirical risk function employing quadratic loss exhibits strong convexity and smoothness uniformly in a local neighborhood of the ground truth, for a class of smooth activation functions satisfying certain properties, including sigmoid and tanh, as soon as the sample complexity is sufficiently large. This implies that if initialized in this neighborhood, gradient descent converges linearly to a critical point that is provably close to the ground truth without requiring a fresh set of samples at each iteration. This significantly improves upon prior results on learning shallow neural networks with multiple neurons. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first global convergence guarantee for one-hidden-layer neural networks using gradient descent over the empirical risk function without resampling at the near-optimal sampling and computational complexity.

Subspace Learning From Bits

Networked sensing, where the goal is to perform complex inference using a large number of inexpensive and decentralized sensors, has become an increasingly attractive research topic due to its applications in wireless sensor networks and internet-of-things. To reduce the communication, sensing and storage complexity, this paper proposes a simple sensing and estimation framework to faithfully recover the principal subspace of high-dimensional data streams using a collection of binary measurements from distributed sensors, without transmitting the whole data. The binary measurements are designed to indicate comparison outcomes of aggregated energy projections of the data samples over pairs of randomly selected directions. When the covariance matrix is a low-rank matrix, we propose a spectral estimator that recovers the principal subspace of the covariance matrix as the subspace spanned by the top eigenvectors of a properly designed surrogate matrix, which is provably accurate as soon as the number of binary measurements is sufficiently large. An adaptive rank selection strategy based on soft thresholding is also presented. Furthermore, we propose a tailored spectral estimator when the covariance matrix is additionally Toeplitz, and show reliable estimation can be obtained from a substantially smaller number of binary measurements. Our results hold even when a constant fraction of the binary measurements is randomly flipped. Finally, we develop a low-complexity online algorithm to track the principal subspace when new measurements arrive sequentially. Numerical examples are provided to validate the proposed approach.