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In this paper, we study the loss landscape of one-hidden-layer neural networks with ReLU-like activation functions trained with the empirical squared loss using gradient descent (GD). We identify the stationary points of such networks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Frank Zhengqing Wu , Berfin Simsek , Francois Gaston Ged

Neural networks trained with gradient descent often learn solutions of increasing complexity over time, a phenomenon known as simplicity bias. Despite being widely observed across architectures, existing theoretical treatments lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Yedi Zhang , Andrew Saxe , Peter E. Latham

In this paper we fully describe the trajectory of gradient flow over diagonal linear networks in the limit of vanishing initialisation. We show that the limiting flow successively jumps from a saddle of the training loss to another until…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Scott Pesme , Nicolas Flammarion

The dynamics of Deep Linear Networks (DLNs) is dramatically affected by the variance $\sigma^2$ of the parameters at initialization $\theta_0$. For DLNs of width $w$, we show a phase transition w.r.t. the scaling $\gamma$ of the variance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-01 Arthur Jacot , François Ged , Berfin Şimşek , Clément Hongler , Franck Gabriel

The training of neural networks by gradient descent methods is a cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. Yet, despite some recent progress, a complete theory explaining its success is still missing. This article presents, for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Etienne Boursier , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Overparameterized ML models, including neural networks, typically induce underdetermined training objectives with multiple global minima. The implicit bias refers to the limiting global minimum that is attained by a common optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-06 Kuo-Wei Lai , Guanghui Wang , Molei Tao , Vidya Muthukumar

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

We study the implicit bias towards low-rank weight matrices when training neural networks (NN) with Weight Decay (WD). We prove that when a ReLU NN is sufficiently trained with Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and WD, its weight matrix is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Ke Chen , Chugang Yi , Haizhao Yang

Deep neural networks are usually trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which minimizes objective function using very rough approximations of gradient, only averaging to the real gradient. Standard approaches like momentum or ADAM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Jarek Duda

Recent works exploring the training dynamics of homogeneous neural network weights under gradient flow with small initialization have established that in the early stages of training, the weights remain small and near the origin, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Akshay Kumar , Jarvis Haupt

The implicit bias induced by the training of neural networks has become a topic of rigorous study. In the limit of gradient flow and gradient descent with appropriate step size, it has been shown that when one trains a deep linear network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Thien Le , Stefanie Jegelka

We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guy Smorodinsky , Sveta Gimpleson , Itay Safran

The implicit biases of gradient-based optimization algorithms are conjectured to be a major factor in the success of modern deep learning. In this work, we investigate the implicit bias of gradient flow and gradient descent in two-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Spencer Frei , Gal Vardi , Peter L. Bartlett , Nathan Srebro , Wei Hu

In deep networks with small initialization, training exhibits long plateaus separated by sharp feature-acquisition transitions. Whereas shallow nonlinear networks and deep linear networks are well studied, extending these analyses to deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Divit Rawal , Michael R. DeWeese

The first part of this paper studies the evolution of gradient flow for homogeneous neural networks near a class of saddle points exhibiting a sparsity structure. The choice of these saddle points is motivated from previous works on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Akshay Kumar , Jarvis Haupt

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

The theory of training deep networks has become a central question of modern machine learning and has inspired many practical advancements. In particular, the gradient descent (GD) optimization algorithm has been extensively studied in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Alexandru Crăciun , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

We study the implicit bias of gradient descent methods in solving a binary classification problem over a linearly separable dataset. The classifier is described by a nonlinear ReLU model and the objective function adopts the exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Tengyu Xu , Yi Zhou , Kaiyi Ji , Yingbin Liang

Dynamical systems theory has recently been applied in optimization to prove that gradient descent algorithms bypass so-called strict saddle points of the loss function. However, in many modern machine learning applications, the required…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Patrick Cheridito , Arnulf Jentzen , Florian Rossmannek

Although gradient descent (GD) almost always escapes saddle points asymptotically [Lee et al., 2016], this paper shows that even with fairly natural random initialization schemes and non-pathological functions, GD can be significantly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-07 Simon S. Du , Chi Jin , Jason D. Lee , Michael I. Jordan , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh
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