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Benign overfitting refers to how over-parameterized neural networks can fit training data perfectly and generalize well to unseen data. While this has been widely investigated theoretically, existing works are limited to two-layer networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Shuning Shang , Xuran Meng , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

In supervised learning, the regularization path is sometimes used as a convenient theoretical proxy for the optimization path of gradient descent initialized from zero. In this paper, we study a modification of the regularization path for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Sebastian Neumayer , Lénaïc Chizat , Michael Unser

Deep neural networks often contain far more parameters than training examples, yet they still manage to generalize well in practice. Classical complexity measures such as VC-dimension or PAC-Bayes bounds usually become vacuous in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Aviral Dhingra

We study why overparameterization -- increasing model size well beyond the point of zero training error -- can hurt test error on minority groups despite improving average test error when there are spurious correlations in the data. Through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Shiori Sagawa , Aditi Raghunathan , Pang Wei Koh , Percy Liang

We consider a teacher-student model of supervised learning with a fully-trained two-layer neural network whose width $k$ and input dimension $d$ are large and proportional. We provide an effective theory for approximating the Bayes-optimal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-02 Jean Barbier , Francesco Camilli , Minh-Toan Nguyen , Mauro Pastore , Rudy Skerk

We study regularization in the context of small sample-size learning with over-parameterized neural networks. Specifically, we shift focus from architectural properties, such as norms on the network weights, to properties of the internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Christoph D. Hofer , Florian Graf , Marc Niethammer , Roland Kwitt

Training a neural network (NN) depends on multiple factors, including but not limited to the initial weights. In this paper, we focus on initializing deep NN parameters such that it performs better, comparing to random or zero…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Mohamad H. Danesh

Generalization in generative modeling is defined as the ability to learn an underlying distribution from a finite dataset and produce novel samples, with evaluation largely driven by held-out performance and perceived sample quality. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Jerome Garnier-Brun , Luca Biggio , Davide Beltrame , Marc Mézard , Luca Saglietti

It is widely observed that deep learning models with learned parameters generalize well, even with much more model parameters than the number of training samples. We systematically investigate the underlying reasons why deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Lei Wu , Zhanxing Zhu , Weinan E

Deep learning relies on good initialization schemes and hyperparameter choices prior to training a neural network. Random weight initializations induce random network ensembles, which give rise to the trainability, training speed, and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-25 Rebekka Burkholz , Alina Dubatovka

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

One of the most surprising and exciting discoveries in supervised learning was the benefit of overparameterization (i.e. training a very large model) to improving the optimization landscape of a problem, with minimal effect on statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-17 Rares-Darius Buhai , Yoni Halpern , Yoon Kim , Andrej Risteski , David Sontag

This paper aims to discuss the impact of random initialization of neural networks in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory, which is ignored by most recent works in the NTK theory. It is well known that as the network's width tends to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-10 Guhan Chen , Yicheng Li , Qian Lin

Data inherently possesses dual attributes: samples and targets. For targets, knowledge distillation has been widely employed to accelerate model convergence, primarily relying on teacher-generated soft target supervision. Conversely, recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Runkang Yang , Peng Sun , Xinyi Shang , Yi Tang , Tao Lin

Path regularization has shown to be a very effective regularization to train neural networks, leading to a better generalization property than common regularizations i.e. weight decay, etc. We propose a first near-complete (as will be made…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Hao Yu

One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Simon S. Du , Xiyu Zhai , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

Modern deep learning models employ considerably more parameters than required to fit the training data. Whereas conventional statistical wisdom suggests such models should drastically overfit, in practice these models generalize remarkably…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-18 Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

In this work, we propose a notion of practical learnability grounded in finite sample settings, and develop a conjugate learning theoretical framework based on convex conjugate duality to characterize this learnability property. Building on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-20 Binchuan Qi

Reconstructing the initial density field of the Universe from the late-time matter distribution is a nontrivial task with implications for understanding structure formation in cosmology, offering insights into early Universe conditions.…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-11-26 Koichiro Nakashima , Kiyotomo Ichiki , Atsushi J. Nishizawa , Kenji Hasegawa

We consider shallow (single hidden layer) neural networks and characterize their performance when trained with stochastic gradient descent as the number of hidden units $N$ and gradient descent steps grow to infinity. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-02 Jiahui Yu , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos