English
Related papers

Related papers: Simplicity bias and optimization threshold in two-…

200 papers

Deep neural networks exhibit a simplicity bias, a well-documented tendency to favor simple functions over complex ones. In this work, we cast new light on this phenomenon through the lens of the Minimum Description Length principle,…

We draw connections between simple neural networks and under-determined linear systems to comprehensively explore several interesting theoretical questions in the study of neural networks. First, we emphatically show that it is unsurprising…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-11-02 Austin R. Benson , Anil Damle , Alex Townsend

We study the implicit regularization of optimization methods for linear models interpolating the training data in the under-parametrized and over-parametrized regimes. Since it is difficult to determine whether an optimizer converges to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Sharan Vaswani , Reza Babanezhad , Jose Gallego-Posada , Aaron Mishkin , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Nicolas Le Roux

Neural networks (NNs) are known to exhibit simplicity bias where they tend to prefer learning 'simple' features over more 'complex' ones, even when the latter may be more informative. Simplicity bias can lead to the model making biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Bhavya Vasudeva , Kameron Shahabi , Vatsal Sharan

The analysis of neural network training beyond their linearization regime remains an outstanding open question, even in the simplest setup of a single hidden-layer. The limit of infinitely wide networks provides an appealing route forward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Jaume de Dios , Joan Bruna

We examine the necessity of interpolation in overparameterized models, that is, when achieving optimal predictive risk in machine learning problems requires (nearly) interpolating the training data. In particular, we consider simple…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-17 Chen Cheng , John Duchi , Rohith Kuditipudi

Monotonic linear interpolation (MLI) - on the line connecting a random initialization with the minimizer it converges to, the loss and accuracy are monotonic - is a phenomenon that is commonly observed in the training of neural networks.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-15 Xiang Wang , Annie N. Wang , Mo Zhou , Rong Ge

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of deep neural networks is one of the key challenges in the modern machine learning literature. Despite numerous attempts, a solid theoretical analysis is yet to be developed. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-14 Tolga Ergen , Mert Pilanci

We study the effects of mild over-parameterization on the optimization landscape of a simple ReLU neural network of the form $\mathbf{x}\mapsto\sum_{i=1}^k\max\{0,\mathbf{w}_i^{\top}\mathbf{x}\}$, in a well-studied teacher-student setting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-02 Itay Safran , Gilad Yehudai , Ohad Shamir

Machine unlearning algorithms aim to remove the influence of specific training samples, ideally recovering the model that would have resulted from training on the remaining data alone. We study unlearning in the overparameterized setting,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jacob L. Block , Aryan Mokhtari , Sanjay Shakkottai

While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Tomaso Poggio , Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao

We develop a convex analytic approach to analyze finite width two-layer ReLU networks. We first prove that an optimal solution to the regularized training problem can be characterized as extreme points of a convex set, where simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Tolga Ergen , Mert Pilanci

A widely believed explanation for the remarkable generalization capacities of overparameterized neural networks is that the optimization algorithms used for training induce an implicit bias towards benign solutions. To grasp this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Maria Matveev , Vit Fojtik , Hung-Hsu Chou , Gitta Kutyniok , Johannes Maly

Despite existing work on ensuring generalization of neural networks in terms of scale sensitive complexity measures, such as norms, margin and sharpness, these complexity measures do not offer an explanation of why neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-31 Behnam Neyshabur , Zhiyuan Li , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Yann LeCun , Nathan Srebro

We prove that, for the fundamental regression task of learning a single neuron, training a one-hidden layer ReLU network of any width by gradient flow from a small initialisation converges to zero loss and is implicitly biased to minimise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Dmitry Chistikov , Matthias Englert , Ranko Lazic

The success of deep neural networks is in part due to the use of normalization layers. Normalization layers like Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization and Weight Normalization are ubiquitous in practice, as they improve generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Yonatan Dukler , Quanquan Gu , Guido Montúfar

Recent theoretical works on over-parameterized neural nets have focused on two aspects: optimization and generalization. Many existing works that study optimization and generalization together are based on neural tangent kernel and require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Shiyu Liang , Ruoyu Sun , R. Srikant

We study overparameterization in generative adversarial networks (GANs) that can interpolate the training data. We show that overparameterization can improve generalization performance and accelerate the training process. We study the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Lorenzo Luzi , Yehuda Dar , Richard Baraniuk

A recent line of work has shown that an overparametrized neural network can perfectly fit the training data, an otherwise often intractable nonconvex optimization problem. For (fully-connected) shallow networks, in the best case scenario,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Armin Eftekhari , ChaeHwan Song , Volkan Cevher

Understanding generalization in overparameterized neural networks hinges on the interplay between the data geometry, neural architecture, and training dynamics. In this paper, we theoretically explore how data geometry controls this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Tongtong Liang , Alexander Cloninger , Rahul Parhi , Yu-Xiang Wang