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Eigenvalue distribution of the Neural Tangent Kernel in the quadratic scaling

Probability 2025-08-28 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We compute the asymptotic eigenvalue distribution of the neural tangent kernel of a two-layer neural network under a specific scaling of dimension. Namely, if XRn×dX\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d} is an i.i.d random matrix, WRd×pW\in\mathbb{R}^{d\times p} is an i.i.d N(0,1)\mathcal{N}(0,1) matrix and DRp×pD\in\mathbb{R}^{p\times p} is a diagonal matrix with i.i.d bounded entries, we consider the matrix NTK=1dXX1pσ(1dXW)D2σ(1dXW) \mathrm{NTK} = \frac{1}{d}XX^\top \odot \frac{1}{p} \sigma'\left( \frac{1}{\sqrt{d}}XW \right)D^2 \sigma'\left( \frac{1}{\sqrt{d}}XW \right)^\top where σ\sigma' is a pseudo-Lipschitz function applied entrywise and under the scaling ndpγ1\frac{n}{dp}\to \gamma_1 and pdγ2\frac{p}{d}\to \gamma_2. We describe the asymptotic distribution as the free multiplicative convolution of the Marchenko--Pastur distribution with a deterministic distribution depending on σ\sigma and DD.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.20036,
  title  = {Eigenvalue distribution of the Neural Tangent Kernel in the quadratic scaling},
  author = {Lucas Benigni and Elliot Paquette},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.20036},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

42 pages, 8 figures