English
Related papers

Related papers: Feature-Learning Networks Are Consistent Across Wi…

200 papers

Scaling limits, such as infinite-width limits, serve as promising theoretical tools to study large-scale models. However, it is widely believed that existing infinite-width theory does not faithfully explain the behavior of practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Moritz Haas , Sebastian Bordt , Ulrike von Luxburg , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

A primary focus area in continual learning research is alleviating the "catastrophic forgetting" problem in neural networks by designing new algorithms that are more robust to the distribution shifts. While the recent progress in continual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Seyed Iman Mirzadeh , Arslan Chaudhry , Dong Yin , Huiyi Hu , Razvan Pascanu , Dilan Gorur , Mehrdad Farajtabar

Understanding how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can efficiently learn high-dimensional functions remains a fundamental challenge. A popular belief is that these models harness the local and hierarchical structure of natural data such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Francesco Cagnetta , Alessandro Favero , Matthieu Wyart

Deep neural networks are widely used prediction algorithms whose performance often improves as the number of weights increases, leading to over-parametrization. We consider a two-layered neural network whose first layer is frozen while the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Roman Worschech , Bernd Rosenow

We develop a theory of transfer learning in infinitely wide neural networks under gradient flow that quantifies when pretraining on a source task improves generalization on a target task. We analyze both (i) fine-tuning, when the downstream…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Clarissa Lauditi , Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

The width of a neural network matters since increasing the width will necessarily increase the model capacity. However, the performance of a network does not improve linearly with the width and soon gets saturated. In this case, we argue…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Shuai Zhao , Liguang Zhou , Wenxiao Wang , Deng Cai , Tin Lun Lam , Yangsheng Xu

Generalization of deep neural networks remains one of the main open problems in machine learning. Previous theoretical works focused on deriving tight bounds of model complexity, while empirical works revealed that neural networks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 James Wang , Cheng-Lin Yang

Feature learning in neural networks is crucial for their expressive power and inductive biases, motivating various theoretical approaches. Some approaches describe network behavior after training through a change in kernel scale from…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-05-29 Noa Rubin , Kirsten Fischer , Javed Lindner , David Dahmen , Inbar Seroussi , Zohar Ringel , Michael Krämer , Moritz Helias

We analyze the learning dynamics of infinitely wide neural networks with a finite sized bottle-neck. Unlike the neural tangent kernel limit, a bottleneck in an otherwise infinite width network al-lows data dependent feature learning in its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-05 Etai Littwin , Omid Saremi , Shuangfei Zhai , Vimal Thilak , Hanlin Goh , Joshua M. Susskind , Greg Yang

A longstanding goal in deep learning research has been to precisely characterize training and generalization. However, the often complex loss landscapes of neural networks have made a theory of learning dynamics elusive. In this work, we…

Do neural network models of vision learn brain-aligned representations because they share architectural constraints and task objectives with biological vision or because they learn universal features of natural image processing? We…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-12-30 Zirui Chen , Michael F. Bonner

We discuss methods for visualizing neural network decision boundaries and decision regions. We use these visualizations to investigate issues related to reproducibility and generalization in neural network training. We observe that changes…

We provide quantitative bounds measuring the $L^2$ difference in function space between the trajectory of a finite-width network trained on finitely many samples from the idealized kernel dynamics of infinite width and infinite data. An…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Benjamin Bowman , Guido Montufar

Feature learning, or the ability of deep neural networks to automatically learn relevant features from raw data, underlies their exceptional capability to solve complex tasks. However, feature learning seems to be realized in different ways…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 R. Aiudi , R. Pacelli , A. Vezzani , R. Burioni , P. Rotondo

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

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

One of the distinguishing characteristics of modern deep learning systems is that they typically employ neural network architectures that utilize enormous numbers of parameters, often in the millions and sometimes even in the billions.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-11-15 Ben Adlam , Jake Levinson , Jeffrey Pennington

We consider dynamical and geometrical aspects of deep learning. For many standard choices of layer maps we display semi-invariant metrics which quantify differences between data or decision functions. This allows us, when considering random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-23 Benny Avelin , Anders Karlsson

With the emergence of large-scale pre-trained neural networks, methods to adapt such "foundation" models to data-limited downstream tasks have become a necessity. Fine-tuning, preference optimization, and transfer learning have all been…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-09 Javan Tahir , Surya Ganguli , Grant M. Rotskoff

Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in practice, yet a mechanistic understanding of how features evolve during training remains incomplete, especially in the large-depth limit. For ResNets under depth-$\mu$P scaling, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zihan Yao , Ruoyu Wu , Tianxiang Gao