Computational Advantages of Multi-Grade Deep Learning: Convergence Analysis and Performance Insights

Multi-grade deep learning (MGDL) has been shown to significantly outperform the standard single-grade deep learning (SGDL) across various applications. This work aims to investigate the computational advantages of MGDL focusing on its performance in image regression, denoising, and deblurring tasks, and comparing it to SGDL. We establish convergence results for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to these models and provide mathematical insights into MGDL's improved performance. In particular, we demonstrate that MGDL is more robust to the choice of learning rate under GD than SGDL. Furthermore, we analyze the eigenvalue distributions of the Jacobian matrices associated with the iterative schemes arising from the GD iterations, offering an explanation for MGDL's enhanced training stability.

Addressing Spectral Bias of Deep Neural Networks by Multi-Grade Deep Learning

Deep neural networks (DNNs) suffer from the spectral bias, wherein DNNs typically exhibit a tendency to prioritize the learning of lower-frequency components of a function, struggling to capture its high-frequency features. This paper is to address this issue. Notice that a function having only low frequency components may be well-represented by a shallow neural network (SNN), a network having only a few layers. By observing that composition of low frequency functions can effectively approximate a high-frequency function, we propose to learn a function containing high-frequency components by composing several SNNs, each of which learns certain low-frequency information from the given data. We implement the proposed idea by exploiting the multi-grade deep learning (MGDL) model, a recently introduced model that trains a DNN incrementally, grade by grade, a current grade learning from the residue of the previous grade only an SNN composed with the SNNs trained in the preceding grades as features. We apply MGDL to synthetic, manifold, colored images, and MNIST datasets, all characterized by presence of high-frequency features. Our study reveals that MGDL excels at representing functions containing high-frequency information. Specifically, the neural networks learned in each grade adeptly capture some low-frequency information, allowing their compositions with SNNs learned in the previous grades effectively representing the high-frequency features. Our experimental results underscore the efficacy of MGDL in addressing the spectral bias inherent in DNNs. By leveraging MGDL, we offer insights into overcoming spectral bias limitation of DNNs, thereby enhancing the performance and applicability of deep learning models in tasks requiring the representation of high-frequency information. This study confirms that the proposed method offers a promising solution to address the spectral bias of DNNs.