Related papers: Learning a Single Neuron for Non-monotonic Activat…
It is widely conjectured that the reason that training algorithms for neural networks are successful because all local minima lead to similar performance, for example, see (LeCun et al., 2015, Choromanska et al., 2015, Dauphin et al.,…
We study the problem of learning an unknown function using random feature models. Our main contribution is an exact asymptotic analysis of such learning problems with Gaussian data. Under mild regularity conditions for the feature matrix,…
We study the problem of gradient descent learning of a single-index target function $f_*(\boldsymbol{x}) = \textstyle\sigma_*\left(\langle\boldsymbol{x},\boldsymbol{\theta}\rangle\right)$ under isotropic Gaussian data in $\mathbb{R}^d$,…
Activation functions are crucial for deep neural networks. This novel work frames the problem of training neural network with learnable polynomial activation functions as a polynomial optimization problem, which is solvable by the…
We give a new algorithm for learning a two-layer neural network under a general class of input distributions. Assuming there is a ground-truth two-layer network $$ y = A \sigma(Wx) + \xi, $$ where $A,W$ are weight matrices, $\xi$ represents…
Gradient-based neural network training traditionally enforces symmetry between forward and backward propagation, requiring activation functions to be differentiable (or sub-differentiable) and strictly monotonic in certain regions to…
Although neural networks are routinely and successfully trained in practice using simple gradient-based methods, most existing theoretical results are negative, showing that learning such networks is difficult, in a worst-case sense over…
The neural coding is yet to be discovered. The neuronal operational modes that arise with fixed inputs but with varying degrees of stimulation help to elucidate their coding properties. In neurons receiving {\it in vivo} stimulation, we…
The scope of research in the domain of activation functions remains limited and centered around improving the ease of optimization or generalization quality of neural networks (NNs). However, to develop a deeper understanding of deep…
We study the problem of training a two-layer neural network (NN) of arbitrary width using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) where the input $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{R}^d$ is Gaussian and the target $y \in \mathbb{R}$ follows a…
We study the dynamics of optimization and the generalization properties of one-hidden layer neural networks with quadratic activation function in the over-parametrized regime where the layer width $m$ is larger than the input dimension $d$.…
Spiking activity of neurons engaged in learning and performing a task show complex spatiotemporal dynamics. While the output of recurrent network models can learn to perform various tasks, the possible range of recurrent dynamics that…
In this work, we study the mean-field flow for learning subspace-sparse polynomials using stochastic gradient descent and two-layer neural networks, where the input distribution is standard Gaussian and the output only depends on the…
The possibility of approximating a continuous function on a compact subset of the real line by a feedforward single hidden layer neural network with a sigmoidal activation function has been studied in many papers. Such networks can…
We provide a convergence analysis of gradient descent for the problem of agnostically learning a single ReLU function with moderate bias under Gaussian distributions. Unlike prior work that studies the setting of zero bias, we consider the…
We prove that, for the fundamental regression task of learning a single neuron, training a one-hidden layer ReLU network of any width by gradient flow from a small initialisation converges to zero loss and is implicitly biased to minimise…
Understanding when neural networks can be learned efficiently is a fundamental question in learning theory. Existing hardness results suggest that assumptions on both the input distribution and the network's weights are necessary for…
Analyzing neural network dynamics via stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is crucial to building theoretical foundations for deep learning. Previous work has analyzed structured inputs within the \textit{hidden manifold model}, often under…
Deep learning models are often successfully trained using gradient descent, despite the worst case hardness of the underlying non-convex optimization problem. The key question is then under what conditions can one prove that optimization…
Although deep learning has shown its powerful performance in many applications, the mathematical principles behind neural networks are still mysterious. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a one-hidden-layer neural network…