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The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-11 Daniel Jiwoong Im , Michael Tao , Kristin Branson

In this paper, we study the dynamics of gradient descent in learning neural networks for classification problems. Unlike in existing works, we consider the linearly non-separable case where the training data of different classes lie in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Ziang Long , Penghang Yin , Jack Xin

The past decade has witnessed a successful application of deep learning to solving many challenging problems in machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the loss functions of deep neural networks (especially nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-23 Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang

Understanding the loss surface of a neural network is fundamentally important to the understanding of deep learning. This paper presents how piecewise linear activation functions substantially shape the loss surfaces of neural networks. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Fengxiang He , Bohan Wang , Dacheng Tao

The question of how and why the phenomenon of mode connectivity occurs in training deep neural networks has gained remarkable attention in the research community. From a theoretical perspective, two possible explanations have been proposed:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Quynh Nguyen , Pierre Brechet , Marco Mondelli

Despite remarkable performance on a variety of tasks, many properties of deep neural networks are not yet theoretically understood. One such mystery is the depth degeneracy phenomenon: the deeper you make your network, the closer your…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-18 Cameron Jakub , Mihai Nica

Gradient descent can be surprisingly good at optimizing deep neural networks without overfitting and without explicit regularization. We find that the discrete steps of gradient descent implicitly regularize models by penalizing gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 David G. T. Barrett , Benoit Dherin

Training neural networks with first order optimisation methods is at the core of the empirical success of deep learning. The scale of initialisation is a crucial factor, as small initialisations are generally associated to a feature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Etienne Boursier , Nicolas Flammarion

We theoretically characterize gradient descent dynamics in deep linear networks trained at large width from random initialization and on large quantities of random data. Our theory captures the ``wider is better" effect of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

We prove that if an activation function satisfies some mild conditions and number of neurons in a two-layered fully connected neural network with this activation function is beyond a certain threshold, then gradient descent on quadratic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-14 Biswarup Das , Eugene. A. Golikov

Classical analyses of gradient descent (GD) define a stability threshold based on the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, often termed sharpness. When the learning rate lies below this threshold, training is stable and the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Lawrence Wang , Stephen J. Roberts

In this work, we investigate the mechanism underlying loss spikes observed during neural network training. When the training enters a region with a lower-loss-as-sharper (LLAS) structure, the training becomes unstable, and the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Xiaolong Li , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Zhongwang Zhang

In computational neuroscience, fixed points of recurrent neural networks are commonly used to model neural responses to static or slowly changing stimuli. These applications raise the question of how to train the weights in a recurrent…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-07-28 Vicky Zhu , Robert Rosenbaum

We show that the representation cost of fully connected neural networks with homogeneous nonlinearities - which describes the implicit bias in function space of networks with $L_2$-regularization or with losses such as the cross-entropy -…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-27 Arthur Jacot

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

Deep neural networks progressively transform their inputs across multiple processing layers. What are the geometrical properties of the representations learned by these networks? Here we study the intrinsic dimensionality (ID) of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Alessio Ansuini , Alessandro Laio , Jakob H. Macke , Davide Zoccolan

The key to generalization is controlling the complexity of the network. However, there is no obvious control of complexity -- such as an explicit regularization term -- in the training of deep networks for classification. We will show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao , Brando Miranda , Lorenzo Rosasco , Fernanda De La Torre , Jack Hidary , Tomaso Poggio

It is widely observed that deep learning models with learned parameters generalize well, even with much more model parameters than the number of training samples. We systematically investigate the underlying reasons why deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Lei Wu , Zhanxing Zhu , Weinan E

The existence of local minima for one-hidden-layer ReLU networks has been investigated theoretically in [8]. Based on the theory, in this paper, we first analyze how big the probability of existing local minima is for 1D Gaussian data and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Bo Liu

Understanding the asymptotic behavior of gradient-descent training of deep neural networks is essential for revealing inductive biases and improving network performance. We derive the infinite-time training limit of a mathematically…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-08 Samuel Lippl , L. F. Abbott , SueYeon Chung