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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

This paper studies how neural network architecture affects the speed of training. We introduce a simple concept called gradient confusion to help formally analyze this. When gradient confusion is high, stochastic gradients produced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Karthik A. Sankararaman , Soham De , Zheng Xu , W. Ronny Huang , Tom Goldstein

We analyze speed of convergence to global optimum for gradient descent training a deep linear neural network (parameterized as $x \mapsto W_N W_{N-1} \cdots W_1 x$) by minimizing the $\ell_2$ loss over whitened data. Convergence at a linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Sanjeev Arora , Nadav Cohen , Noah Golowich , Wei Hu

In deep learning, a central issue is to understand how neural networks efficiently learn high-dimensional features. To this end, we explore the gradient descent learning of a general Gaussian Multi-index model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Bohan Zhang , Zihao Wang , Hengyu Fu , Jason D. Lee

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) has become increasingly popular for training models that can quickly adapt to new tasks via one or few stochastic gradient descent steps. However, the MAML objective is significantly more difficult to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-11 Liam Collins , Aryan Mokhtari , Sanjay Shakkottai

Network alignment (NA) is the task of finding the correspondence of nodes between two networks based on the network structure and node attributes. Our study is motivated by the fact that, since most of existing NA methods have attempted to…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Jin-Duk Park , Cong Tran , Won-Yong Shin , Xin Cao

Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) demonstrates tremendous success in practice, especially when combined with neural networks. Different from reinforcement learning, GAIL learns both policy and reward function from expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Yufeng Zhang , Qi Cai , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang

When random label noise is added to a training dataset, the prediction error of a neural network on a label-noise-free test dataset initially improves during early training but eventually deteriorates, following a U-shaped dependence on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Chaoyue Liu , Amirhesam Abedsoltan , Mikhail Belkin

Continual learning, the ability of a model to adapt to an ongoing sequence of tasks without forgetting earlier ones, is a central goal of artificial intelligence. To better understand its underlying mechanisms, we study the limitations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Hossein Taheri , Avishek Ghosh , Arya Mazumdar

Neural networks in the lazy training regime converge to kernel machines. Can neural networks in the rich feature learning regime learn a kernel machine with a data-dependent kernel? We demonstrate that this can indeed happen due to a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-07 Alexander Atanasov , Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML) is widely used to find a good initialization for a family of tasks. Despite its success, a critical challenge in MAML is to calculate the gradient w.r.t. the initialization of a long training trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-27 Shibo Li , Zheng Wang , Akil Narayan , Robert Kirby , Shandian Zhe

Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is one of the most successful meta-learning techniques for few-shot learning. It uses gradient descent to learn commonalities between various tasks, enabling the model to learn the meta-initialization of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Lin Ding , Peng Liu , Wenfeng Shen , Weijia Lu , Shengbo Chen

Active learning (AL) algorithms aim to identify an optimal subset of data for annotation, such that deep neural networks (DNN) can achieve better performance when trained on this labeled subset. AL is especially impactful in industrial…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Zeyad Ali Sami Emam , Hong-Min Chu , Ping-Yeh Chiang , Wojciech Czaja , Richard Leapman , Micah Goldblum , Tom Goldstein

For high-dimensional Gaussian data, we investigate theoretically how the features of a two-layer neural network adapt to the structure of the target function through a few large batch gradient descent steps, leading to an improvement in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-05 Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro , Luca Pesce , Ludovic Stephan

A widely believed explanation for the remarkable generalization capacities of overparameterized neural networks is that the optimization algorithms used for training induce an implicit bias towards benign solutions. To grasp this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Maria Matveev , Vit Fojtik , Hung-Hsu Chou , Gitta Kutyniok , Johannes Maly

The proper initialization of weights is crucial for the effective training and fast convergence of deep neural networks (DNNs). Prior work in this area has mostly focused on balancing the variance among weights per layer to maintain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Maciej Skorski , Alessandro Temperoni , Martin Theobald

Proper initialisation strategy is of primary importance to mitigate gradient explosion or vanishing when training neural networks. Yet, the impact of initialisation parameters still lacks a precise theoretical understanding for several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Andrea Combette , Antoine Venaille , Nelly Pustelnik

Numerous empirical evidence has corroborated that the noise plays a crucial rule in effective and efficient training of neural networks. The theory behind, however, is still largely unknown. This paper studies this fundamental problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Mo Zhou , Tianyi Liu , Yan Li , Dachao Lin , Enlu Zhou , Tuo Zhao

Several recent works have shown separation results between deep neural networks, and hypothesis classes with inferior approximation capacity such as shallow networks or kernel classes. On the other hand, the fact that deep networks can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Eran Malach , Gilad Yehudai , Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Ohad Shamir