A Variational Inequality Model for Learning Neural Networks

Neural networks have become ubiquitous tools for solving signal and image processing problems, and they often outperform standard approaches. Nevertheless, training the layers of a neural network is a challenging task in many applications. The prevalent training procedure consists of minimizing highly non-convex objectives based on data sets of huge dimension. In this context, current methodologies are not guaranteed to produce global solutions. We present an alternative approach which foregoes the optimization framework and adopts a variational inequality formalism. The associated algorithm guarantees convergence of the iterates to a true solution of the variational inequality and it possesses an efficient block-iterative structure. A numerical application is presented.