Infinitely deep neural networks as diffusion processes

Abstract

When the parameters are independently and identically distributed (initialized) neural networks exhibit undesirable properties that emerge as the number of layers increases, e.g. a vanishing dependency on the input and a concentration on restrictive families of functions including constant functions. We consider parameter distributions that shrink as the number of layers increases in order to recover well-behaved stochastic processes in the limit of infinite depth. This leads to set forth a link between infinitely deep residual networks and solutions to stochastic differential equations, i.e. diffusion processes. We show that these limiting processes do not suffer from the aforementioned issues and investigate their properties.