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Contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful framework for learning generalizable representations, yet its theoretical understanding remains limited, particularly under imbalanced data distributions that are prevalent in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Haixu Liao , Yating Zhou , Songyang Zhang , Meng Wang , Shuai Zhang

Recent studies revealed complex convergence dynamics in gradient-based methods, which has been little understood so far. Changing the step size to balance between high convergence rate and small generalization error may not be sufficient:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Ilona Kulikovskikh

In this work, we investigate a particular implicit bias in gradient descent training, which we term "Feature Averaging," and argue that it is one of the principal factors contributing to the non-robustness of deep neural networks. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Binghui Li , Zhixuan Pan , Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

Triplet learning, i.e. learning from triplet data, has attracted much attention in computer vision tasks with an extremely large number of categories, e.g., face recognition and person re-identification. Albeit with rapid progress in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-21 Jun Chen , Hong Chen , Xue Jiang , Bin Gu , Weifu Li , Tieliang Gong , Feng Zheng

Understanding deep neural networks (DNNs) is a key challenge in the theory of machine learning, with potential applications to the many fields where DNNs have been successfully used. This article presents a scaling limit for a DNN being…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Dyego Araújo , Roberto I. Oliveira , Daniel Yukimura

Training modern neural networks often relies on large learning rates, operating at the edge of stability, where the optimization dynamics exhibit oscillatory and chaotic behavior. Empirically, this regime often yields improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Mario Tuci , Caner Korkmaz , Umut Şimşekli , Tolga Birdal

We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Blake Woodworth

Autoencoders are among the earliest introduced nonlinear models for unsupervised learning. Although they are widely adopted beyond research, it has been a longstanding open problem to understand mathematically the feature extraction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Phan-Minh Nguyen

Neural networks are known to develop latent representations that are $aligned$, namely structurally similar across networks trained with different architectures, training protocols, or training datasets. We study this phenomenon in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-27 Ali Hussaini Umar , Alessandro Laio

While a lot of progress has been made in recent years, the dynamics of learning in deep nonlinear neural networks remain to this day largely misunderstood. In this work, we study the case of binary classification and prove various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Remi Tachet , Mohammad Pezeshki , Samira Shabanian , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

State-of-the-art neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, making the optimization algorithm a crucial ingredient for learning predictive models with good generalization properties. A recent line of work has shown that in a certain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-01 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

Algorithmic stability is among the most potent techniques in generalization analysis. However, its derivation usually requires a stepsize $\eta_t = \mathcal{O}(1/t)$ under non-convex training regimes, where $t$ denotes iterations. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Wenquan Ma , Yang Sui , Jiaye Teng , Bohan Wang , Jing Xu , Jingqin Yang

In this paper we develop a new perspective on generalization of neural networks by proposing and investigating the concept of a neural network stiffness. We measure how stiff a network is by looking at how a small gradient step in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Stanislav Fort , Paweł Krzysztof Nowak , Stanislaw Jastrzebski , Srini Narayanan

Stability is a fundamental property of dynamical systems, yet to this date it has had little bearing on the practice of recurrent neural networks. In this work, we conduct a thorough investigation of stable recurrent models. Theoretically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-05 John Miller , Moritz Hardt

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Scott Pesme , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Natural gradient descent is a principled method for adapting the parameters of a statistical model on-line using an underlying Riemannian parameter space to redefine the direction of steepest descent. The algorithm is examined via methods…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2009-10-31 Magnus Rattray , David Saad

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

We study large deviations in the context of stochastic gradient descent for one-hidden-layer neural networks with quadratic loss. We derive a quenched large deviation principle, where we condition on an initial weight measure, and an…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-01-14 Christian Hirsch , Daniel Willhalm

Regression neural networks (NNs) are most commonly trained by minimizing the mean squared prediction error, which is highly sensitive to outliers and data contamination. Existing robust training methods for regression NNs are often limited…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Abhik Ghosh , Suryasis Jana

Understanding how neural networks learn remains one of the central challenges in machine learning research. From random at the start of training, the weights of a neural network evolve in such a way as to be able to perform a variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-28 Maxime Gabella