Demystify the Gravity Well in the Optimization Landscape (Student Abstract)

Abstract

We provide both empirical and theoretical insights to demystify the gravity well phenomenon in the optimization landscape. We start from describe the problem setup and theoretical results (an escape time lower bound) of the Softmax Gravity Well (SGW) in the literature. Then we move toward the understanding of a recent observation called ASR gravity well. We provide an explanation of why normal distribution with high variance can lead to suboptimal plateaus from an energy function point of view. We also contribute to the empirical insights of curriculum learning by comparison of policy initialization by different normal distributions. Furthermore, we provide the ASR escape time lower bound to understand the ASR gravity well theoretically. Future work includes more specific modeling of the reward as a function of time and quantitative evaluation of normal distribution’s influence on policy initialization.