Related papers: Theory of Deep Learning III: explaining the non-ov…
Training deep neural networks typically relies on backpropagating high dimensional error signals a computationally intensive process with little evidence supporting its implementation in the brain. However, since most tasks involve…
An important characteristic of neural networks is their ability to learn representations of the input data with effective features for prediction, which is believed to be a key factor to their superior empirical performance. To better…
We focus on semiparametric regression that has played a central role in statistics, and exploit the powerful learning ability of deep neural networks (DNNs) while enabling statistical inference on parameters of interest that offers…
Deep networks are typically trained with many more parameters than the size of the training dataset. Recent empirical evidence indicates that the practice of overparameterization not only benefits training large models, but also assists -…
In recent years, artificial neural networks have developed into a powerful tool for addressing a multitude of problems for which classical solution approaches reach their limits. However, it is still unclear why gradient descent…
Traditional analyses of gradient descent optimization show that, when the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian - often referred to as the sharpness - is below a critical learning-rate threshold, then training is 'stable' and training loss…
Modern deep learning models employ considerably more parameters than required to fit the training data. Whereas conventional statistical wisdom suggests such models should drastically overfit, in practice these models generalize remarkably…
We draw connections between simple neural networks and under-determined linear systems to comprehensively explore several interesting theoretical questions in the study of neural networks. First, we emphatically show that it is unsurprising…
Deep neural networks demonstrate to have a high performance on image classification tasks while being more difficult to train. Due to the complexity and vanishing gradient problem, it normally takes a lot of time and more computational…
This paper develops fundamental limits of deep neural network learning by characterizing what is possible if no constraints are imposed on the learning algorithm and on the amount of training data. Concretely, we consider Kolmogorov-optimal…
Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…
The ability of overparameterized deep networks to interpolate noisy data, while at the same time showing good generalization performance, has been recently characterized in terms of the double descent curve for the test error. Common…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods for training deep networks in practice. SGD is known to find a flat minimum that often generalizes well. However, it is mathematically unclear how deep learning can…
The training of neural networks by gradient descent methods is a cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. Yet, despite some recent progress, a complete theory explaining its success is still missing. This article presents, for…
The dynamics of gradient-based training in neural networks often exhibit nontrivial structures; hence, understanding them remains a central challenge in theoretical machine learning. In particular, a concept of feature unlearning, in which…
In deep learning, dense layer connectivity has become a key design principle in deep neural networks (DNNs), enabling efficient information flow and strong performance across a range of applications. In this work, we model densely connected…
We present a framework to define a large class of neural networks for which, by construction, training by gradient flow provably reaches arbitrarily low loss when the number of parameters grows. Distinct from the fixed-space global…
When training deep neural networks with gradient descent, sharpness often increases -- a phenomenon known as progressive sharpening -- before saturating at the edge of stability. Although commonly observed in practice, the underlying…
We analyze the training dynamics for deep linear networks using a new metric - layer imbalance - which defines the flatness of a solution. We demonstrate that different regularization methods, such as weight decay or noise data…
Modern deep neural networks are highly over-parameterized compared to the data on which they are trained, yet they often generalize remarkably well. A flurry of recent work has asked: why do deep networks not overfit to their training data?…