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Feature learning is widely regarded as the key mechanism distinguishing neural networks from fixed-kernel methods, yet its impact on the induced function space remains poorly understood. In this work, we precisely characterize how the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 João Lobo , Bruno Loureiro , Long Tran-Than , Fanghui Liu

We learn recurrent neural network optimizers trained on simple synthetic functions by gradient descent. We show that these learned optimizers exhibit a remarkable degree of transfer in that they can be used to efficiently optimize a broad…

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and variants have been surprisingly successful for training deep nets, several aspects of the optimization dynamics and generalization are still not well understood. In this paper, we present new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-26 Xinyan Li , Qilong Gu , Yingxue Zhou , Tiancong Chen , Arindam Banerjee

Near an optimal learning point of a neural network, the learning performance of gradient descent dynamics is dictated by the Hessian matrix of the loss function with respect to the network parameters. We characterize the Hessian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-18 Carlos Couto , José Mourão , Mário A. T. Figueiredo , Pedro Ribeiro

This paper studies generalization capabilities of neural networks (NNs) using new and improved PyTorch library Loss Landscape Analysis (LLA). LLA facilitates visualization and analysis of loss landscapes along with the properties of NN…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Nikita Gabdullin

In deep learning, it is common to use more network parameters than training points. In such scenarioof over-parameterization, there are usually multiple networks that achieve zero training error so that thetraining algorithm induces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Hung-Hsu Chou , Carsten Gieshoff , Johannes Maly , Holger Rauhut

Being able to quickly adapt to changes in dynamics is paramount in model-based control for object manipulation tasks. In order to influence fast adaptation of the inverse dynamics model's parameters, data efficiency is crucial. Given…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Kristen Morse , Neha Das , Yixin Lin , Austin S. Wang , Akshara Rai , Franziska Meier

When optimizing over-parameterized models, such as deep neural networks, a large set of parameters can achieve zero training error. In such cases, the choice of the optimization algorithm and its respective hyper-parameters introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Gauthier Gidel , Francis Bach , Simon Lacoste-Julien

Deep learning has non-convex loss landscape and its optimization dynamics is hard to analyze or control. Nevertheless, the dynamics can be empirically convex-like across various tasks, models, optimizers, hyperparameters, etc. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhiqi Bu , Shiyun Xu , Jialin Mao

Deep neural networks trained using gradient descent with a fixed learning rate $\eta$ often operate in the regime of "edge of stability" (EOS), where the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian equilibrates about the stability threshold $2/\eta$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-03 Avrajit Ghosh , Soo Min Kwon , Rongrong Wang , Saiprasad Ravishankar , Qing Qu

We present PYHESSIAN, a new scalable framework that enables fast computation of Hessian (i.e., second-order derivative) information for deep neural networks. PYHESSIAN enables fast computations of the top Hessian eigenvalues, the Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Zhewei Yao , Amir Gholami , Kurt Keutzer , Michael Mahoney

In deep learning, it is usually assumed that the shape of the loss surface is fixed. Differently, a novel concept of deformation operator is first proposed in this paper to deform the loss surface, thereby improving the optimization.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Liangming Chen , Long Jin , Xiujuan Du , Shuai Li , Mei Liu

We present multi-point optimization: an optimization technique that allows to train several models simultaneously without the need to keep the parameters of each one individually. The proposed method is used for a thorough empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Ivan Skorokhodov , Mikhail Burtsev

In order to better understand feature learning in neural networks, we propose a framework for understanding linear models in tangent feature space where the features are allowed to be transformed during training. We consider linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Daniel LeJeune , Sina Alemohammad

In the past decade, significant strides in deep learning have led to numerous groundbreaking applications. Despite these advancements, the understanding of the high generalizability of deep learning, especially in such an over-parametrized…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-09-17 Hao Liao , Wei Zhang , Zhanyi Huang , Zexiao Long , Mingyang Zhou , Xiaoqun Wu , Rui Mao , Chi Ho Yeung

We refine a recently-proposed class of local entropic loss functions by restricting the smoothening regularization to only a subset of weights. The new loss functions are referred to as partial local entropies. They can adapt to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Daniele Musso

How to train deep neural networks (DNNs) to generalize well is a central concern in deep learning, especially for severely overparameterized networks nowadays. In this paper, we propose an effective method to improve the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Yang Zhao , Hao Zhang , Xiuyuan Hu

Understanding the learning dynamics of neural networks is one of the key issues for the improvement of optimization algorithms as well as for the theoretical comprehension of why deep neural nets work so well today. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-18 Zhenyu Liao , Romain Couillet

We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Anthony Nouy , Agustín Somacal

Underpinning the past decades of work on the design, initialization, and optimization of neural networks is a seemingly innocuous assumption: that the network is trained on a \textit{stationary} data distribution. In settings where this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Clare Lyle , Zeyu Zheng , Khimya Khetarpal , Hado van Hasselt , Razvan Pascanu , James Martens , Will Dabney