English
Related papers

Related papers: Neural Networks as Kernel Learners: The Silent Ali…

200 papers

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the "kernel regime," i.e. when the network behaves during training as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Blake Woodworth , Suriya Gunasekar , Pedro Savarese , Edward Moroshko , Itay Golan , Jason Lee , Daniel Soudry , Nathan Srebro

In suitably initialized wide networks, small learning rates transform deep neural networks (DNNs) into neural tangent kernel (NTK) machines, whose training dynamics is well-approximated by a linear weight expansion of the network at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Stanislav Fort , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mansheej Paul , Sepideh Kharaghani , Daniel M. Roy , Surya Ganguli

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

An important characteristic of neural networks is their ability to learn representations of the input data with effective features for prediction, which is believed to be a key factor to their superior empirical performance. To better…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-06 Zhenmei Shi , Junyi Wei , Yingyu Liang

We study deep neural networks (DNNs) trained on natural image data with entirely random labels. Despite its popularity in the literature, where it is often used to study memorization, generalization, and other phenomena, little is known…

Previous research has shown that fully-connected networks with small initialization and gradient-based training methods exhibit a phenomenon known as condensation during training. This phenomenon refers to the input weights of hidden…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Zhangchen Zhou , Hanxu Zhou , Yuqing Li , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Contemporary wisdom based on empirical studies suggests that standard recurrent neural networks (RNNs) do not perform well on tasks requiring long-term memory. However, precise reasoning for this behavior is still unknown. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Melikasadat Emami , Mojtaba Sahraee-Ardakan , Parthe Pandit , Sundeep Rangan , Alyson K. Fletcher

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

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

Understanding how deep neural networks learn remains a fundamental challenge in modern machine learning. A growing body of evidence suggests that training dynamics undergo a distinct phase transition, yet our understanding of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhanpeng Zhou , Yongyi Yang , Mahito Sugiyama , Junchi Yan

Symmetries (transformations by group actions) are present in many datasets, and leveraging them holds considerable promise for improving predictions in machine learning. In this work, we aim to understand when and how deep networks -- with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Andrea Perin , Stephane Deny

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

The success of deep learning in high-dimensional settings is often attributed to the presence of low-dimensional structure in real-world data. While standard theoretical models typically assume that this structure lies in the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Elisabetta Cornacchia , Laurent Massoulié

In this paper, we study the feature learning ability of two-layer neural networks in the mean-field regime through the lens of kernel methods. To focus on the dynamics of the kernel induced by the first layer, we utilize a two-timescale…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Shokichi Takakura , Taiji Suzuki

Training a neural network is synonymous with learning the values of the weights. By contrast, we demonstrate that randomly weighted neural networks contain subnetworks which achieve impressive performance without ever training the weight…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Vivek Ramanujan , Mitchell Wortsman , Aniruddha Kembhavi , Ali Farhadi , Mohammad Rastegari

Wide neural networks with linear output layer have been shown to be near-linear, and to have near-constant neural tangent kernel (NTK), in a region containing the optimization path of gradient descent. These findings seem counter-intuitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-11 Chaoyue Liu , Libin Zhu , Mikhail Belkin

The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is an important milestone in the ongoing effort to build a theory for deep learning. Its prediction that sufficiently wide neural networks behave as kernel methods, or equivalently as random feature models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Maxim Samarin , Volker Roth , David Belius

Deep neural network is the widely applied technology in this decade. In spite of the fruitful applications, the mechanism behind that is still to be elucidated. We study the learning process with a very simple supervised learning encoding…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-04-18 Kenichi Nakazato

We propose that the grokking phenomenon, where the train loss of a neural network decreases much earlier than its test loss, can arise due to a neural network transitioning from lazy training dynamics to a rich, feature learning regime. To…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-12 Tanishq Kumar , Blake Bordelon , Samuel J. Gershman , Cengiz Pehlevan

Previous influential work showed that infinite width limits of neural networks in the lazy training regime are described by kernel machines. Here, we show that neural networks trained in the rich, feature learning infinite-width regime in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Clarissa Lauditi , Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan