Why Deep Learning Works: Implicit Self-Regularization in DNNs, Michael W. Mahoney 20190225

Michael W. Mahoney UC Berkeley Random Matrix Theory (RMT) is applied to analyze the weight matrices of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including both production quality, pre-trained models and smaller models trained from scratch. Empirical and theoretical results clearly indicate that the DNN training process itself implicitly implements a form of self-regularization, implicitly sculpting a more regularized energy or penalty landscape. In particular, the empirical spectral density (ESD) of DNN layer matrices