Noise-induced degeneration in online learning

Abstract In order to elucidate the plateau phenomena caused by vanishing gradient, we herein analyse stability of stochastic gradient descent near degenerated subspaces in a multi-layer perceptron. In stochastic gradient descent for Fukumizu-Amari model, which is the minimal multi-layer perceptron showing non-trivial plateau phenomena, we show that (1) attracting regions exist in multiply degenerated subspaces, (2) a strong plateau phenomenon emerges as a noise-induced synchronisation, which is not observed in deterministic gradient descent, (3) an optimal fluctuation exists to minimise the escape time from the degenerated subspace. The noise-induced degeneration observed herein is expected to be found in a broad class of machine learning via neural networks.