  Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex
high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent
(SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good
minimizers without getting stuck in local critical points, and that such
minimizers are often satisfactory at avoiding overfitting. How these two
features can be kept under control in nonlinear devices composed of millions of
tunable connections is a profound and far reaching open question. In this paper
we study basic non-convex one- and two-layer neural network models which learn
random patterns, and derive a number of basic geometrical and algorithmic
features which suggest some answers. We first show that the error loss function
presents few extremely wide flat minima (WFM) which coexist with narrower
minima and critical points. We then show that the minimizers of the
cross-entropy loss function overlap with the WFM of the error loss. We also
show examples of learning devices for which WFM do not exist. From the
algorithmic perspective we derive entropy driven greedy and message passing
algorithms which focus their search on wide flat regions of minimizers. In the
case of SGD and cross-entropy loss, we show that a slow reduction of the norm
of the weights along the learning process also leads to WFM. We corroborate the
results by a numerical study of the correlations between the volumes of the
minimizers, their Hessian and their generalization performance on real data.
