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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

We consider the approximation of functions by 2-layer neural networks with a small number of hidden weights based on the squared loss and small datasets. Due to the highly non-convex energy landscape, gradient-based training often suffers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Johannes Hertrich , Sebastian Neumayer

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

We study the supervised learning problem under either of the following two models: (1) Feature vectors ${\boldsymbol x}_i$ are $d$-dimensional Gaussians and responses are $y_i = f_*({\boldsymbol x}_i)$ for $f_*$ an unknown quadratic…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-24 Behrooz Ghorbani , Song Mei , Theodor Misiakiewicz , Andrea Montanari

Deep learning empirically achieves high performance in many applications, but its training dynamics has not been fully understood theoretically. In this paper, we explore theoretical analysis on training two-layer ReLU neural networks in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-30 Shunta Akiyama , Taiji Suzuki

Significant theoretical work has established that in specific regimes, neural networks trained by gradient descent behave like kernel methods. However, in practice, it is known that neural networks strongly outperform their associated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Carlo Baldassi , Fabrizio Pittorino , Riccardo Zecchina

Integrating task-relevant information into neural representations is a fundamental ability of both biological and artificial intelligence systems. Recent theories have categorized learning into two regimes: the rich regime, where neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Chi-Ning Chou , Hang Le , Yichen Wang , SueYeon Chung

Random Fourier features (RFFs) provide a promising way for kernel learning in a spectral case. Current RFFs-based kernel learning methods usually work in a two-stage way. In the first-stage process, learning the optimal feature map is often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Kun Fang , Fanghui Liu , Xiaolin Huang , Jie Yang

One of the central questions in the theory of deep learning is to understand how neural networks learn hierarchical features. The ability of deep networks to extract salient features is crucial to both their outstanding generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-03 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

Understanding the inductive bias and generalization properties of large overparametrized machine learning models requires to characterize the dynamics of the training algorithm. We study the learning dynamics of large two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-30 Andrea Montanari , Pierfrancesco Urbani

Recent theoretical studies illustrated that kernel ridgeless regression can guarantee good generalization ability without an explicit regularization. In this paper, we investigate the statistical properties of ridgeless regression with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-30 Jian Li , Yong Liu , Yingying Zhang

We study generalised linear regression and classification for a synthetically generated dataset encompassing different problems of interest, such as learning with random features, neural networks in the lazy training regime, and the hidden…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-28 Federica Gerace , Bruno Loureiro , Florent Krzakala , Marc Mézard , Lenka Zdeborová

We study the training and generalization of deep neural networks (DNNs) in the over-parameterized regime, where the network width (i.e., number of hidden nodes per layer) is much larger than the number of training data points. We show that,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

A key challenge in building theoretical foundations for deep learning is the complex optimization dynamics of neural networks, resulting from the high-dimensional interactions between the large number of network parameters. Such non-trivial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Mohammad Pezeshki , Amartya Mitra , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

We address the challenging problem of deep representation learning--the efficient adaption of a pre-trained deep network to different tasks. Specifically, we propose to explore gradient-based features. These features are gradients of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Fangzhou Mu , Yingyu Liang , Yin Li

The asymptotically precise estimation of the generalization of kernel methods has recently received attention due to the parallels between neural networks and their associated kernels. However, prior works derive such estimates for training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Maksim Velikanov , Maxim Panov , Dmitry Yarotsky

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

We study the training dynamics of shallow neural networks, in a two-timescale regime in which the stepsizes for the inner layer are much smaller than those for the outer layer. In this regime, we prove convergence of the gradient flow to a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-26 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier

Although deep learning has shown its powerful performance in many applications, the mathematical principles behind neural networks are still mysterious. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a one-hidden-layer neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-17 Shuhao Xia , Yuanming Shi