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Most stochastic gradient descent algorithms can optimize neural networks that are sub-differentiable in their parameters; however, this implies that the neural network's activation function must exhibit a degree of continuity which limits…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-16 Anastasis Kratsios , Behnoosh Zamanlooy

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

The paper briefy reviews several recent results on hierarchical architectures for learning from examples, that may formally explain the conditions under which Deep Convolutional Neural Networks perform much better in function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Hrushikesh Mhaskar , Tomaso Poggio

We theoretically characterize gradient descent dynamics in deep linear networks trained at large width from random initialization and on large quantities of random data. Our theory captures the ``wider is better" effect of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

We consider supervised learning with $n$ labels and show that layerwise SGD on residual networks can efficiently learn a class of hierarchical models. This model class assumes the existence of an (unknown) label hierarchy $L_1 \subseteq L_2…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Amit Daniely

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in computer vision; however, training DNNs for satisfactory performance remains challenging and suffers from sensitivity to empirical selections of an optimization algorithm for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Haichao Zhang , Kuangrong Hao , Lei Gao , Bing Wei , Xuesong Tang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in deep learning due to its computational efficiency, but a complete understanding of why SGD performs so well remains a major challenge. It has been observed empirically that most…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Carmina Fjellström , Kaj Nyström

Peer-to-peer learning is an increasingly popular framework that enables beyond-5G distributed edge devices to collaboratively train deep neural networks in a privacy-preserving manner without the aid of a central server. Neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Shreyas Chaudhari , Srinivasa Pranav , Emile Anand , José M. F. Moura

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

This paper identifies a structural property of data distributions that enables deep neural networks to learn hierarchically. We define the "staircase" property for functions over the Boolean hypercube, which posits that high-order Fourier…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Emmanuel Abbe , Enric Boix-Adsera , Matthew Brennan , Guy Bresler , Dheeraj Nagaraj

A fundamental question in deep learning concerns the role played by individual layers in a deep neural network (DNN) and the transferable properties of the data representations which they learn. To the extent that layers have clear roles,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Oded Ben-David , Zohar Ringel

Deep learning has been applied to various tasks in the field of machine learning and has shown superiority to other common procedures such as kernel methods. To provide a better theoretical understanding of the reasons for its success, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-31 Satoshi Hayakawa , Taiji Suzuki

Generalization of deep neural networks remains one of the main open problems in machine learning. Previous theoretical works focused on deriving tight bounds of model complexity, while empirical works revealed that neural networks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 James Wang , Cheng-Lin Yang

Deep multi-task learning attracts much attention in recent years as it achieves good performance in many applications. Feature learning is important to deep multi-task learning for sharing common information among tasks. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-13 Pengxin Guo , Chang Deng , Linjie Xu , Xiaonan Huang , Yu Zhang

Deep neural networks are often trained in the over-parametrized regime (i.e. with far more parameters than training examples), and understanding why the training converges to solutions that generalize remains an open problem. Several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-23 Hartmut Maennel , Olivier Bousquet , Sylvain Gelly

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

It has been shown that gradient descent can yield the zero training loss in the over-parametrized regime (the width of the neural networks is much larger than the number of data points). In this work, combining the ideas of some existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Lei Li

Understanding how deep neural networks learn useful internal representations from data remains a central open problem in the theory of deep learning. We introduce Neural Low-Degree Filtering (Neural LoFi), a stylized limit of gradient-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Yatin Dandi , Matteo Vilucchio , Luca Arnaboldi , Hugo Tabanelli , Florent Krzakala

Understanding how feature learning affects generalization is among the foremost goals of modern deep learning theory. Here, we study how the ability to learn representations affects the generalization performance of a simple class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , William L. Tong , Cengiz Pehlevan

Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ansh Nagwekar