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The energy landscape of high-dimensional non-convex optimization problems is crucial to understanding the effectiveness of modern deep neural network architectures. Recent works have experimentally shown that two different solutions found…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Damien Ferbach , Baptiste Goujaud , Gauthier Gidel , Aymeric Dieuleveut

Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Raphaël Barboni , Maarten V. de Hoop , Takashi Furuya , Gabriel Peyré

One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Simon S. Du , Xiyu Zhai , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

We consider optimizing two-layer neural networks in the mean-field regime where the learning dynamics of network weights can be approximated by the evolution in the space of probability measures over the weight parameters associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-19 Jingwei Zhang , Xunpeng Huang , Jincheng Yu

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari , Phan-Minh Nguyen

The paper contains approximation guarantees for neural networks that are trained with gradient flow, with error measured in the continuous $L_2(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$-norm on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere and targets that are Sobolev smooth.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 G. Welper

In this work, we develop new optimization algorithms that use approximate second-order information combined with the gradient regularization technique to achieve fast global convergence rates for both convex and non-convex objectives. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-17 Andrei Semenov , Martin Jaggi , Nikita Doikov

The computation of Wasserstein gradient direction is essential for posterior sampling problems and scientific computing. The approximation of the Wasserstein gradient with finite samples requires solving a variational problem. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Yifei Wang , Peng Chen , Mert Pilanci , Wuchen Li

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful framework for generative modeling, offering computational advantages over diffusion models by leveraging deterministic Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) instead of stochastic dynamics. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Chengyue Gong , Xiaoyu Li , Yingyu Liang , Jiangxuan Long , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yu Tian

Implicit deep learning has recently become popular in the machine learning community since these implicit models can achieve competitive performance with state-of-the-art deep networks while using significantly less memory and computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Tianxiang Gao , Hongyang Gao

We study the large deviation rate functional for the empirical distribution of independent Brownian particles with drift. In one dimension, it has been shown by Adams, Dirr, Peletier and Zimmer that this functional is asymptotically…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-01-11 Matthias Erbar , Jan Maas , Michiel Renger

We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global optimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We show that if the trained weights, as a function of the layer index,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Rama Cont , Alain Rossier , RenYuan Xu

We study the local convergence of diffusive mean-field systems, including Wasserstein gradient flows, min-max dynamics, and multi-species games. We establish exponential local convergence in $\chi^2$-divergence with sharp rates, under two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 Guillaume Wang , Lénaïc Chizat

We study non-convex subgradient flows for training two-layer ReLU neural networks from a convex geometry and duality perspective. We characterize the implicit bias of unregularized non-convex gradient flow as convex regularization of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Yifei Wang , Mert Pilanci

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

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-17 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We consider finite-volume approximations of Fokker-Planck equations on bounded convex domains in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and study the corresponding gradient flow structures. We reprove the convergence of the discrete to continuous Fokker-Planck…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2020-08-26 Dominik Forkert , Jan Maas , Lorenzo Portinale

The stochastic heavy ball method (SHB), also known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with Polyak's momentum, is widely used in training neural networks. However, despite the remarkable success of such algorithm in practice, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Diyuan Wu , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Marco Mondelli

Finding parameters in a deep neural network (NN) that fit training data is a nonconvex optimization problem, but a basic first-order optimization method (gradient descent) finds a global optimizer with perfect fit (zero-loss) in many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Zhiyan Ding , Shi Chen , Qin Li , Stephen Wright

The proximal algorithm is a powerful tool to minimize nonlinear and nonsmooth functionals in a general metric space. Motivated by the recent progress in studying the training dynamics of the noisy gradient descent algorithm on two-layer…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Shuailong Zhu , Xiaohui Chen