English
Related papers

Related papers: Stabilizing RNN Gradients through Pre-training

200 papers

Many applications of machine learning require a model to make accurate pre-dictions on test examples that are distributionally different from training ones, while task-specific labels are scarce during training. An effective approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Weihua Hu , Bowen Liu , Joseph Gomes , Marinka Zitnik , Percy Liang , Vijay Pande , Jure Leskovec

Asynchronous execution is essential for scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to modern large model workloads, including large language models and AI agents, but it can fundamentally alter RL optimization behavior. While prior work on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Haofeng Xu , Junwei Su , Yukun Tian , Lansong Diao , Zhengping Qian , Chuan Wu

It is known that training deep neural networks, in particular, deep convolutional networks, with aggressively reduced numerical precision is challenging. The stochastic gradient descent algorithm becomes unstable in the presence of noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-11 Darryl D. Lin , Sachin S. Talathi

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have developed into useful tools for probabilistic modelling due to recent advances in variational inference enabling large scale BNNs. However, BNNs remain brittle and hard to train, especially: (1) when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-24 Felix McGregor , Arnu Pretorius , Johan du Preez , Steve Kroon

Gradient dynamics play a central role in determining the stability and generalization of deep neural networks. In this work, we provide an empirical analysis of how variance and standard deviation of gradients evolve during training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Vincent-Daniel Yun

We develop a mean field theory for batch normalization in fully-connected feedforward neural networks. In so doing, we provide a precise characterization of signal propagation and gradient backpropagation in wide batch-normalized networks…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-03-07 Greg Yang , Jeffrey Pennington , Vinay Rao , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Samuel S. Schoenholz

In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated outstanding effectiveness in a large amount of applications.However, recent works have shown that neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, indicating possible flaws…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Fuxun Yu , Zirui Xu , Yanzhi Wang , Chenchen Liu , Xiang Chen

When an online learning algorithm is used to estimate the unknown parameters of a model, the signals interacting with the parameter estimates should not decay too quickly for the optimal values to be discovered correctly. This requirement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Kamil Nar , S. Shankar Sastry

We analyze recurrent neural networks with diagonal hidden-to-hidden weight matrices, trained with gradient descent in the supervised learning setting, and prove that gradient descent can achieve optimality \emph{without} massive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

Reinforcement Learning (RL) for training Large Language Models is notoriously unstable. While recent studies attribute this to "training inference mismatch stemming" from inconsistent hybrid engines, standard remedies, such as Importance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yaxiang Zhang , Yingru Li , Jiacai Liu , Jiawei Xu , Ziniu Li , Qian Liu , Haoyuan Li

Modern neural networks are typically trained in an over-parameterized regime where the parameters of the model far exceed the size of the training data. Such neural networks in principle have the capacity to (over)fit any set of labels…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-05 Mingchen Li , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Samet Oymak

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown promising performance for language modeling. However, traditional training of RNNs using back-propagation through time often suffers from overfitting. One reason for this is that stochastic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-04-25 Zhe Gan , Chunyuan Li , Changyou Chen , Yunchen Pu , Qinliang Su , Lawrence Carin

After a more than decade-long period of relatively little research activity in the area of recurrent neural networks, several new developments will be reviewed here that have allowed substantial progress both in understanding and in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-12-17 Yoshua Bengio , Nicolas Boulanger-Lewandowski , Razvan Pascanu

Overparameterized Neural Networks (NN) display state-of-the-art performance. However, there is a growing need for smaller, energy-efficient, neural networks tobe able to use machine learning applications on devices with limited…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-21 Soufiane Hayou , Jean-Francois Ton , Arnaud Doucet , Yee Whye Teh

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

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are wide-spread machine learning tools for modeling sequential and time series data. They are notoriously hard to train because their loss gradients backpropagated in time tend to saturate or diverge during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Jonas M. Mikhaeil , Zahra Monfared , Daniel Durstewitz

Stability of recurrent models is closely linked with trainability, generalizability and in some applications, safety. Methods that train stable recurrent neural networks, however, do so at a significant cost to expressibility. We propose an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Max Revay , Ian R. Manchester

Generalization analyses of deep learning typically assume that the training converges to a fixed point. But, recent results indicate that in practice, the weights of deep neural networks optimized with stochastic gradient descent often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-22 Nisha Chandramoorthy , Andreas Loukas , Khashayar Gatmiry , Stefanie Jegelka

We empirically demonstrate that full-batch gradient descent on neural network training objectives typically operates in a regime we call the Edge of Stability. In this regime, the maximum eigenvalue of the training loss Hessian hovers just…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Jeremy M. Cohen , Simran Kaur , Yuanzhi Li , J. Zico Kolter , Ameet Talwalkar

Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-12 Abhay Yadav , Sohil Shah , Zheng Xu , David Jacobs , Tom Goldstein