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We study feature learning in two-layer neural networks within the linear-width regime, where the number of hidden neurons, sample size, and input dimension scale proportionally. While recent work has analyzed feature learning via a single…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-25 Behrad Moniri , Hamed Hassani

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

Neural networks can identify low-dimensional relevant structures within high-dimensional noisy data, yet our mathematical understanding of how they do so remains scarce. Here, we investigate the training dynamics of two-layer shallow neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-11 Luca Arnaboldi , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Luca Pesce , Ludovic Stephan

We investigate the training dynamics of two-layer neural networks when learning multi-index target functions. We focus on multi-pass gradient descent (GD) that reuses the batches multiple times and show that it significantly changes the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Yatin Dandi , Emanuele Troiani , Luca Arnaboldi , Luca Pesce , Lenka Zdeborová , Florent Krzakala

Feature learning is thought to be one of the fundamental reasons for the success of deep neural networks. It is rigorously known that in two-layer fully-connected neural networks under certain conditions, one step of gradient descent on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-11 Behrad Moniri , Donghwan Lee , Hamed Hassani , Edgar Dobriban

In this manuscript, we investigate the problem of how two-layer neural networks learn features from data, and improve over the kernel regime, after being trained with a single gradient descent step. Leveraging the insight from (Ba et al.,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Hugo Cui , Luca Pesce , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Yue M. Lu , Lenka Zdeborová , Bruno Loureiro

Understanding the advantages of deep neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) compared to shallow models remains an open theoretical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a class of target functions (single and multi-index Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-17 Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Lenka Zdeborová , Florent Krzakala

In this work, we study the training and generalization performance of two-layer neural networks (NNs) after one gradient descent step under structured data modeled by Gaussian mixtures. While previous research has extensively analyzed this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-20 Samet Demir , Zafer Dogan

Gradient-based learning in multi-layer neural networks displays a number of striking features. In particular, the decrease rate of empirical risk is non-monotone even after averaging over large batches. Long plateaus in which one observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Raphaël Berthier , Andrea Montanari , Kangjie Zhou

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

A key property of neural networks is their capacity of adapting to data during training. Yet, our current mathematical understanding of feature learning and its relationship to generalization remain limited. In this work, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-25 Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Hugo Cui , Florent Krzakala , Yue M. Lu , Bruno Loureiro

According to a popular viewpoint, neural networks learn from data by first identifying low-dimensional representations, and subsequently fitting the best model in this space. Recent works provide a formalization of this phenomenon when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Andrea Montanari , Zihao Wang

The ability of learning useful features is one of the major advantages of neural networks. Although recent works show that neural network can operate in a neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime that does not allow feature learning, many works…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Mo Zhou , Rong Ge

It has been shown that gradient descent can yield the zero training loss in the over-parametrized regime (the width of the neural networks is much larger than the number of data points). In this work, combining the ideas of some existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Lei Li

Recent success in training deep neural networks have prompted active investigation into the features learned on their intermediate layers. Such research is difficult because it requires making sense of non-linear computations performed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Yixuan Li , Jason Yosinski , Jeff Clune , Hod Lipson , John Hopcroft

Large batch size training in deep neural networks (DNNs) possesses a well-known 'generalization gap' that remarkably induces generalization performance degradation. However, it remains unclear how varying batch size affects the structure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Fengli Gao , Huicai Zhong

In this work, we provide a sharp theory of scaling laws for two-layer neural networks trained on a class of hierarchical multi-index targets, in a genuinely representation-limited regime. We derive exact information-theoretic scaling laws…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Leonardo Defilippis , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro , Antoine Maillard

This study explores the sample complexity for two-layer neural networks to learn a generalized linear target function under Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), focusing on the challenging regime where many flat directions are present at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-04 Luca Arnaboldi , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro , Ludovic Stephan

A recent series of theoretical works showed that the dynamics of neural networks with a certain initialisation are well-captured by kernel methods. Concurrent empirical work demonstrated that kernel methods can come close to the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-11 Maria Refinetti , Sebastian Goldt , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in various fields, particularly in the domain of computer vision. However, why this architecture works well remains to be a mystery. In this work we move a small step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-27 Bing Yu , Junzhao Zhang , Zhanxing Zhu
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