On the problem of local minima in backpropagation

The authors propose a theoretical framework for backpropagation (BP) in order to identify some of its limitations as a general learning procedure and the reasons for its success in several experiments on pattern recognition. The first important conclusion is that examples can be found in which BP gets stuck in local minima. A simple example in which BP can get stuck during gradient descent without having learned the entire training set is presented. This example guarantees the existence of a solution with null cost. Some conditions on the network architecture and the learning environment that ensure the convergence of the BP algorithm are proposed. It is proven in particular that the convergence holds if the classes are linearly separable. In this case, the experience gained in several experiments shows that multilayered neural networks (MLNs) exceed perceptrons in generalization to new examples.<
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