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The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) has recently attracted intense study, as it describes the evolution of an over-parameterized Neural Network (NN) trained by gradient descent. However, it is now well-known that gradient descent is not always…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Lei Tan , Shutong Wu , Xiaolin Huang

In wide neural networks, the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) remains approximately constant during training, providing a powerful theoretical tool for studying training dynamics, generalization, and connections to kernel methods. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jonathan Plenk , Sergio Calvo-Ordonez , Alvaro Cartea , Yarin Gal , Mark van der Wilk , Kamil Ciosek

The ``Neural Tangent Kernel'' (NTK) (Jacot et al 2018), and its empirical variants have been proposed as a proxy to capture certain behaviors of real neural networks. In this work, we study NTKs through the lens of scaling laws, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Nikhil Vyas , Yamini Bansal , Preetum Nakkiran

A seminal work [Jacot et al., 2018] demonstrated that training a neural network under specific parameterization is equivalent to performing a particular kernel method as width goes to infinity. This equivalence opened a promising direction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Eugene Golikov , Eduard Pokonechnyy , Vladimir Korviakov

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), defined as $\Theta_\theta^f(x_1, x_2) = \left[\partial f(\theta, x_1)\big/\partial \theta\right] \left[\partial f(\theta, x_2)\big/\partial \theta\right]^T$ where $\left[\partial f(\theta,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Roman Novak , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Samuel S. Schoenholz

A rising trend in theoretical deep learning is to understand why deep learning works through Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) [jgh18], a kernel method that is equivalent to using gradient descent to train a multi-layer infinitely-wide neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Lianke Qin , Zhao Song , Baocheng Sun

Recent works have examined theoretical and empirical properties of wide neural networks trained in the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime. Given that biological neural networks are much wider than their artificial counterparts, we consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Akhilan Boopathy , Ila Fiete

While deep learning has achieved remarkable success across a wide range of applications, its theoretical understanding of representation learning remains limited. Deep neural kernels provide a principled framework to interpret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yong-Ming Tian , Shuang Liang , Shao-Qun Zhang , Feng-Lei Fan

Common infinite-width architectures such as Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) have historically shown weak performance compared to finite models. This is usually attributed to the absence of feature learning. We show that this explanation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Luke Sernau

A recent breakthrough in deep learning theory shows that the training of over-parameterized deep neural networks can be characterized by a kernel function called \textit{neural tangent kernel} (NTK). However, it is known that this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Zixiang Chen , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) characterizes the behavior of infinitely-wide neural networks trained under least squares loss by gradient descent. Recent works also report that NTK regression can outperform finitely-wide neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-09 Amir Zandieh , Insu Han , Haim Avron , Neta Shoham , Chaewon Kim , Jinwoo Shin

Going beyond stochastic gradient descent (SGD), what new phenomena emerge in wide neural networks trained by adaptive optimizers like Adam? Here we show: The same dichotomy between feature learning and kernel behaviors (as in SGD) holds for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Greg Yang , Etai Littwin

The training dynamics and generalization properties of neural networks (NN) can be precisely characterized in function space via the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Structural changes to the NTK during training reflect feature learning and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-11 Haozhe Shan , Blake Bordelon

The prevailing thinking is that orthogonal weights are crucial to enforcing dynamical isometry and speeding up training. The increase in learning speed that results from orthogonal initialization in linear networks has been well-proven.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-22 Wei Huang , Weitao Du , Richard Yi Da Xu

Recent theoretical works based on the neural tangent kernel (NTK) have shed light on the optimization and generalization of over-parameterized networks, and partially bridge the gap between their practical success and classical learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-10 Kyung-Su Kim , Aurélie C. Lozano , Eunho Yang

For certain infinitely-wide neural networks, the neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory fully characterizes generalization, but for the networks used in practice, the empirical NTK only provides a rough first-order approximation. Still, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Guillermo Ortiz-Jiménez , Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli , Pascal Frossard

Recent research shows that the following two models are equivalent: (a) infinitely wide neural networks (NNs) trained under l2 loss by gradient descent with infinitesimally small learning rate (b) kernel regression with respect to so-called…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Sanjeev Arora , Simon S. Du , Zhiyuan Li , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Ruosong Wang , Dingli Yu

Gradient descent yields zero training loss in polynomial time for deep neural networks despite non-convex nature of the objective function. The behavior of network in the infinite width limit trained by gradient descent can be described by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Yuqing Li , Tao Luo , Nung Kwan Yip

The NTK is a widely used tool in the theoretical analysis of deep learning, allowing us to look at supervised deep neural networks through the lenses of kernel regression. Recently, several works have investigated kernel models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Maximilian Fleissner , Gautham Govind Anil , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

Scaling laws offer valuable insights into the relationship between neural network performance and computational cost, yet their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we empirically analyze how neural networks behave…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Konstantin Nikolaou , Sven Krippendorf , Samuel Tovey , Christian Holm