On Gradient Descent Convergence beyond the Edge of Stability

Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where it can be seen as a 'bona-fide' discretisation of an underlying gradient flow. Yet, many ML setups involving overparametrised models do not fall into this problem class, which has motivated research beyond the so-called "Edge of Stability", where the step-size crosses the admissibility threshold inversely proportional to the Lipschitz constant above. Perhaps surprisingly, GD has been empirically observed to still converge regardless of local instability. In this work, we study a local condition for such an unstable convergence around a local minima in a low dimensional setting. We then leverage these insights to establish global convergence of a two-layer single-neuron ReLU student network aligning with the teacher neuron in a large learning rate beyond the Edge of Stability under population loss. Meanwhile, while the difference of norms of the two layers is preserved by gradient flow, we show that GD above the edge of stability induces a balancing effect, leading to the same norms across the layers.