More is Less: Inducing Sparsity via Overparameterization

In deep learning it is common to overparameterize the neural networks, that is, to use more parameters than training samples. Quite surprisingly training the neural network via (stochastic) gradient descent leads to models that generalize very well, while classical statistics would suggest overfitting. In order to gain understanding of this implicit bias phenomenon we study the special case of sparse recovery (compressive sensing) which is of interest on its own. More precisely, in order to reconstruct a vector from underdetermined linear measurements, we introduce a corresponding overparameterized square loss functional, where the vector to be reconstructed is deeply factorized into several vectors. We show that, under a very mild assumption on the measurement matrix, vanilla gradient flow for the overparameterized loss functional converges to a solution of minimal $\ell_1$-norm. The latter is well-known to promote sparse solutions. As a by-product, our results significantly improve the sample complexity for compressive sensing in previous works. The theory accurately predicts the recovery rate in numerical experiments. For the proofs, we introduce the concept of {\textit{solution entropy}}, which bypasses the obstacles caused by non-convexity and should be of independent interest.