  Theoretical analysis of the error landscape of deep neural networks has
garnered significant interest in recent years. In this work, we theoretically
study the importance of noise in the trajectories of gradient descent towards
optimal solutions in multi-layer neural networks. We show that adding noise (in
different ways) to a neural network while training increases the rank of the
product of weight matrices of a multi-layer linear neural network. We thus
study how adding noise can assist reaching a global optimum when the product
matrix is full-rank (under certain conditions). We establish theoretical
foundations between the noise induced into the neural network - either to the
gradient, to the architecture, or to the input/output to a neural network - and
the rank of product of weight matrices. We corroborate our theoretical findings
with empirical results.
