English
Related papers

Related papers: How Does Gradient Descent Learn Features -- A Loca…

200 papers

Rich feature learning in tasks that unfold over time often requires the model to pass through bifurcations, constituting qualitative changes in the underlying model dynamics. We develop a local theory of gradient descent near these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 James Hazelden , Eric Shea-Brown

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

What features neural networks learn, and how, remains an open question. In this paper, we introduce Alternating Gradient Flows (AGF), an algorithmic framework that describes the dynamics of feature learning in two-layer networks trained…

The paper contains approximation guarantees for neural networks that are trained with gradient flow, with error measured in the continuous $L_2(\mathbb{S}^{d-1})$-norm on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere and targets that are Sobolev smooth.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-12 G. Welper

We study nonparametric regression by an over-parameterized two-layer neural network trained by gradient descent (GD) in this paper. We show that, if the neural network is trained by GD with early stopping, then the trained network renders a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-07 Yingzhen Yang , Ping Li

We propose Neural Gradient Learning (NGL), a deep learning approach to learn gradient vectors with consistent orientation from 3D point clouds for normal estimation. It has excellent gradient approximation properties for the underlying…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Qing Li , Huifang Feng , Kanle Shi , Yi Fang , Yu-Shen Liu , Zhizhong Han

We study whether a depth two neural network can learn another depth two network using gradient descent. Assuming a linear output node, we show that the question of whether gradient descent converges to the target function is equivalent to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-06 Rina Panigrahy , Sushant Sachdeva , Qiuyi Zhang

Understanding the dynamics of neural networks in different width regimes is crucial for improving their training and performance. We present an exact solution for the learning dynamics of a one-hidden-layer linear network, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Yizhou Xu , Liu Ziyin

Neural networks are typically trained with a single learning rate across all layers. While recent empirical evidence suggests that assigning layer-specific learning rates can accelerate training, a principled understanding of the conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sihan Zeng , Sujay Bhatt , Sumitra Ganesh

A recent goal in the theory of deep learning is to identify how neural networks can escape the "lazy training," or Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regime, where the network is coupled with its first order Taylor expansion at initialization.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Eshaan Nichani , Yu Bai , Jason D. Lee

In this paper, we present some theoretical work to explain why simple gradient descent methods are so successful in solving non-convex optimization problems in learning large-scale neural networks (NN). After introducing a mathematical tool…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Hui Jiang

Feature Learning aims to extract relevant information contained in data sets in an automated fashion. It is driving force behind the current deep learning trend, a set of methods that have had widespread empirical success. What is lacking…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-04-02 Brendan van Rooyen , Robert C. Williamson

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

Gating is a key feature in modern neural networks including LSTMs, GRUs and sparsely-gated deep neural networks. The backbone of such gated networks is a mixture-of-experts layer, where several experts make regression decisions and gating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Ashok Vardhan Makkuva , Sewoong Oh , Sreeram Kannan , Pramod Viswanath

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

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

Gradient-based meta-learning methods leverage gradient descent to learn the commonalities among various tasks. While previous such methods have been successful in meta-learning tasks, they resort to simple gradient descent during…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-15 Yoonho Lee , Seungjin Choi

Sequential training from task to task is becoming one of the major objects in deep learning applications such as continual learning and transfer learning. Nevertheless, it remains unclear under what conditions the trained model's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-21 Ryo Karakida , Shotaro Akaho

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 this paper, we propose a novel training strategy for convolutional neural network(CNN) named Feature Mining, that aims to strengthen the network's learning of the local feature. Through experiments, we find that semantic contained in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Tianshu Xie , Xuan Cheng , Xiaomin Wang , Minghui Liu , Jiali Deng , Ming Liu