  Quantification of the stationary points and the associated basins of
attraction of neural network loss surfaces is an important step towards a
better understanding of neural network loss surfaces at large. This work
proposes a novel method to visualise basins of attraction together with the
associated stationary points via gradient-based random sampling. The proposed
technique is used to perform an empirical study of the loss surfaces generated
by two different error metrics: quadratic loss and entropic loss. The empirical
observations confirm the theoretical hypothesis regarding the nature of neural
network attraction basins. Entropic loss is shown to exhibit stronger gradients
and fewer stationary points than quadratic loss, indicating that entropic loss
has a more searchable landscape. Quadratic loss is shown to be more resilient
to overfitting than entropic loss. Both losses are shown to exhibit local
minima, but the number of local minima is shown to decrease with an increase in
dimensionality. Thus, the proposed visualisation technique successfully
captures the local minima properties exhibited by the neural network loss
surfaces, and can be used for the purpose of fitness landscape analysis of
neural networks.
