English
Related papers

Related papers: Investigating the interaction between gradient-onl…

200 papers

In this article we investigate blow up phenomena for gradient descent optimization methods in the training of artificial neural networks (ANNs). Our theoretical analysis is focused on shallow ANNs with one neuron on the input layer, one…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-29 Davide Gallon , Arnulf Jentzen , Felix Lindner

Neural networks are a powerful class of functions that can be trained with simple gradient descent to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of applications. Despite their practical success, there is a paucity of results that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-06 Bo Xie , Yingyu Liang , Le Song

A surprising phenomenon in the training of neural networks is the ability of gradient descent to find global minimizers of the training loss despite its non-convexity. Following earlier works, we investigate this behavior for wide shallow…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Romain Petit , Clarice Poon , Gabriel Peyré

A key challenge in modern deep learning theory is to explain the remarkable success of gradient-based optimization methods when training large-scale, complex deep neural networks. Though linear convergence of such methods has been proved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yash Jakhmola

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

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

In recent years, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) based techniques has become the standard tools for training neural networks. However, formal theoretical understanding of why SGD can train neural networks in practice is largely missing.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-03 Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Alberto Marchisio , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Semeen Rehman , Maurizio Martina , Muhammad Shafique

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mingi Kang , Zai Yang , Jeova Farias Sales Rocha Neto

High sensitivity of neural architecture search (NAS) methods against their input such as step-size (i.e., learning rate) and search space prevents practitioners from applying them out-of-the-box to their own problems, albeit its purpose is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-22 Youhei Akimoto , Shinichi Shirakawa , Nozomu Yoshinari , Kento Uchida , Shota Saito , Kouhei Nishida

Deep neural networks are often trained in the over-parametrized regime (i.e. with far more parameters than training examples), and understanding why the training converges to solutions that generalize remains an open problem. Several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-23 Hartmut Maennel , Olivier Bousquet , Sylvain Gelly

The ability of neural networks to provide `best in class' approximation across a wide range of applications is well-documented. Nevertheless, the powerful expressivity of neural networks comes to naught if one is unable to effectively train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Mark Ainsworth , Yeonjong Shin

Common nonlinear activation functions used in neural networks can cause training difficulties due to the saturation behavior of the activation function, which may hide dependencies that are not visible to vanilla-SGD (using first order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Caglar Gulcehre , Marcin Moczulski , Misha Denil , Yoshua Bengio

The training of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is nowadays a highly relevant algorithmic procedure with many applications in science and industry. Roughly speaking, ANNs can be regarded as iterated compositions between affine linear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-14 Simon Eberle , Arnulf Jentzen , Adrian Riekert , Georg Weiss

Training Artificial Neural Networks poses a challenging and critical problem in machine learning. Despite the effectiveness of gradient-based learning methods, such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), in training neural networks, they do…

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

To understand learning the dynamics of deep ReLU networks, we investigate the dynamic system of gradient flow $w(t)$ by decomposing it to magnitude $w(t)$ and angle $\phi(t):= \pi - \theta(t) $ components. In particular, for multi-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Sangmin Lee , Byeongsu Sim , Jong Chul Ye

It is well known that neural networks with rectified linear units (ReLU) activation functions are positively scale-invariant. Conventional algorithms like stochastic gradient descent optimize the neural networks in the vector space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-24 Qi Meng , Shuxin Zheng , Huishuai Zhang , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Gradient-based adversarial attacks subtly manipulate inputs of Machine Learning (ML) models to induce incorrect predictions. This paper investigates whether careful architectural choices alone can yield an inherently robust Deep Neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Mohamed elShehaby , Ashraf Matrawy

ReLU neural-networks have been in the focus of many recent theoretical works, trying to explain their empirical success. Nonetheless, there is still a gap between current theoretical results and empirical observations, even in the case of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Jonathan Fiat , Eran Malach , Shai Shalev-Shwartz