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It has been shown that gradient descent can yield the zero training loss in the over-parametrized regime (the width of the neural networks is much larger than the number of data points). In this work, combining the ideas of some existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Lei Li

A quadratic approximation of neural network loss landscapes has been extensively used to study the optimization process of these networks. Though, it usually holds in a very small neighborhood of the minimum, it cannot explain many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Chao Ma , Daniel Kunin , Lei Wu , Lexing Ying

In this paper, we theoretically prove that gradient descent can find a global minimum of non-convex optimization of all layers for nonlinear deep neural networks of sizes commonly encountered in practice. The theory developed in this paper…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-18 Kenji Kawaguchi , Jiaoyang Huang

We consider the dynamics of gradient descent (GD) in overparameterized single hidden layer neural networks with a squared loss function. Recently, it has been shown that, under some conditions, the parameter values obtained using GD achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-17 Siddhartha Satpathi , R Srikant

We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over "diagonal linear networks". This is the simplest model displaying a transition between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Edward Moroshko , Suriya Gunasekar , Blake Woodworth , Jason D. Lee , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

We analyze multi-layer neural networks in the asymptotic regime of simultaneously (A) large network sizes and (B) large numbers of stochastic gradient descent training iterations. We rigorously establish the limiting behavior of the…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-04-06 Justin Sirignano , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

Modern machine learning models are often trained in a setting where the number of parameters exceeds the number of training samples. To understand the implicit bias of gradient descent in such overparameterized models, prior work has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Hannes Matt , Dominik Stöger

We give a simple local Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) criterion that guarantees linear (exponential) convergence of gradient flow and gradient descent to a zero-loss solution of a nonnegative objective. We then verify this criterion for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Sourav Chatterjee

We consider the problem of training a deep orthogonal linear network, which consists of a product of orthogonal matrices, with no non-linearity in-between. We show that training the weights with Riemannian gradient descent is equivalent to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-30 Pierre Ablin

While the optimization problem behind deep neural networks is highly non-convex, it is frequently observed in practice that training deep networks seems possible without getting stuck in suboptimal points. It has been argued that this is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Quynh Nguyen , Matthias Hein

We address the challenging problem of deep representation learning--the efficient adaption of a pre-trained deep network to different tasks. Specifically, we propose to explore gradient-based features. These features are gradients of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Fangzhou Mu , Yingyu Liang , Yin Li

Transformer models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhen Qin , Jinxin Zhou , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

Training neural networks means solving a high-dimensional optimization problem. Normally the goal is to minimize a loss function that depends on what is called the network function, or in other words the function that gives the network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Umberto Michelucci

It has been empirically observed that the flatness of minima obtained from training deep networks seems to correlate with better generalization. However, for deep networks with positively homogeneous activations, most measures of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Akshay Rangamani , Nam H. Nguyen , Abhishek Kumar , Dzung Phan , Sang H. Chin , Trac D. Tran

The implicit bias towards solutions with favorable properties is believed to be a key reason why neural networks trained by gradient-based optimization can generalize well. While the implicit bias of gradient flow has been widely studied…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yiwen Kou , Zixiang Chen , Quanquan Gu

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland

We examine gradient descent on unregularized logistic regression problems, with homogeneous linear predictors on linearly separable datasets. We show the predictor converges to the direction of the max-margin (hard margin SVM) solution. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Daniel Soudry , Elad Hoffer , Mor Shpigel Nacson , Suriya Gunasekar , Nathan Srebro

In this work, we investigate a particular implicit bias in gradient descent training, which we term "Feature Averaging," and argue that it is one of the principal factors contributing to the non-robustness of deep neural networks. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Binghui Li , Zhixuan Pan , Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

We prove that, for the fundamental regression task of learning a single neuron, training a one-hidden layer ReLU network of any width by gradient flow from a small initialisation converges to zero loss and is implicitly biased to minimise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Dmitry Chistikov , Matthias Englert , Ranko Lazic

The paper surveys recent progresses in understanding the dynamics and loss landscape of the gradient flow equations associated to deep linear neural networks, i.e., the gradient descent training dynamics (in the limit when the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Joel Wendin , Claudio Altafini