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Among many mysteries behind the success of deep networks lies the exceptional discriminative power of their learned representations as manifested by the intriguing Neural Collapse (NC) phenomenon, where simple feature structures emerge at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Hancheng Min , Zhihui Zhu , René Vidal

Current training data attribution (TDA) methods treat the influence one sample has on another as static, but neural networks learn in distinct stages that exhibit changing patterns of influence. In this work, we introduce a framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Jin Hwa Lee , Matthew Smith , Maxwell Adam , Jesse Hoogland

Deep neural networks achieve stellar generalisation even when they have enough parameters to easily fit all their training data. We study this phenomenon by analysing the dynamics and the performance of over-parameterised two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Sebastian Goldt , Madhu S. Advani , Andrew M. Saxe , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Gradient-based bilevel optimisation is a powerful technique with applications in hyperparameter optimisation, task adaptation, algorithm discovery, meta-learning more broadly, and beyond. It often requires differentiating through the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Iurii Kemaev , Dan A Calian , Luisa M Zintgraf , Gregory Farquhar , Hado van Hasselt

Neural networks are trained primarily based on their inputs and outputs, without regard for their internal mechanisms. These neglected mechanisms determine properties that are critical for safety, like (i) transparency; (ii) the absence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Alex Cloud , Jacob Goldman-Wetzler , Evžen Wybitul , Joseph Miller , Alexander Matt Turner

This paper introduces feature gradient flow, a new technique for interpreting deep learning models in terms of features that are understandable to humans. The gradient flow of a model locally defines nonlinear coordinates in the input data…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-07-26 Yinzhu Jin , Jonathan C. Garneau , P. Thomas Fletcher

Despite tremendous success of deep neural network in machine learning, the underlying reason for its superior learning capability remains unclear. Here, we present a framework based on statistical physics to study dynamics of stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Yu Feng , Yuhai Tu

Advancements in artificial intelligence call for a deeper understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying deep learning. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze learning dynamics through the lens of dynamical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Yuchen Lin , Yong Zhang , Sihan Feng , Hong Zhao

Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of domains, yet our understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. In this work, we identify a recurrent focus-dilution cycle in attention learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Zheng-An Chen , Pengxiao Lin , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Tao Luo

Driven by the need to solve increasingly complex optimization problems in signal processing and machine learning, there has been increasing interest in understanding the behavior of gradient-descent algorithms in non-convex environments.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-04 Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

Fitting neural networks often resorts to stochastic (or similar) gradient descent which is a noise-tolerant (and efficient) resolution of a gradient descent dynamics. It outputs a sequence of networks parameters, which sequence evolves…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-04-15 Gabriel Turinici

Despite recent theoretical progress on the non-convex optimization of two-layer neural networks, it is still an open question whether gradient descent on neural networks without unnatural modifications can achieve better sample complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Arvind Mahankali , Jeff Z. Haochen , Kefan Dong , Margalit Glasgow , Tengyu Ma

We study the dynamics of gradient flow for training a multi-head softmax attention model for in-context learning of multi-task linear regression. We establish the global convergence of gradient flow under suitable choices of initialization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Deep learning has received considerable empirical successes in recent years. However, while many ad hoc tricks have been discovered by practitioners, until recently, there has been a lack of theoretical understanding for tricks invented in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Cong Fang , Hanze Dong , Tong Zhang

In the brain, learning signals change over time and synaptic location, and are applied based on the learning history at the synapse, in the complex process of neuromodulation. Learning in artificial neural networks, on the other hand, is…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-12-11 Dennis G Wilson , Sylvain Cussat-Blanc , Hervé Luga , Kyle Harrington

Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

In this paper, we advocate for two stages in a neural network's decision making process. The first is the existing feed-forward inference framework where patterns in given data are sensed and associated with previously learned patterns. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-20 Mohit Prabhushankar , Ghassan AlRegib

We theoretically characterize gradient descent dynamics in deep linear networks trained at large width from random initialization and on large quantities of random data. Our theory captures the ``wider is better" effect of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

Recurrent neural network is a powerful model that learns temporal patterns in sequential data. For a long time, it was believed that recurrent networks are difficult to train using simple optimizers, such as stochastic gradient descent, due…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-04-20 Tomas Mikolov , Armand Joulin , Sumit Chopra , Michael Mathieu , Marc'Aurelio Ranzato

Neural networks trained via gradient descent with random initialization and without any regularization enjoy good generalization performance in practice despite being highly overparametrized. A promising direction to explain this phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Hancheng Min , Salma Tarmoun , Rene Vidal , Enrique Mallada