Related papers: Explaining Grokking and Information Bottleneck thr…
Modern deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance on tasks from image classification to natural language processing. Surprisingly, these complex systems with massive amounts of parameters exhibit the same structural…
Neural Collapse (NC) gives a precise description of the representations of classes in the final hidden layer of classification neural networks. This description provides insights into how these networks learn features and generalize well…
Recursive learning -- where models are trained on data generated by previous versions of themselves -- is increasingly common in large language models, autonomous agents, and self-supervised systems. However, standard performance metrics…
In this paper, we introduce matrix entropy as an analytical tool for studying supervised learning, investigating the information content of data representations and classification head vectors, as well as the dynamic interactions between…
Over the past decade, deep neural networks have proven to be adept in image classification tasks, often surpassing humans in terms of accuracy. However, standard neural networks often fail to understand the concept of hierarchical…
A key challenge in building theoretical foundations for deep learning is the complex optimization dynamics of neural networks, resulting from the high-dimensional interactions between the large number of network parameters. Such non-trivial…
Grokking describes a delayed generalization phenomenon in which a neural network achieves perfect training accuracy long before validation accuracy improves, followed by an abrupt transition to strong generalization. Existing detection…
To improve how neural networks function it is crucial to understand their learning process. The information bottleneck theory of deep learning proposes that neural networks achieve good generalization by compressing their representations to…
Despite the popularity and success of deep learning, there is limited understanding of when, how, and why neural networks generalize to unseen examples. Since learning can be seen as extracting information from data, we formally study…
Improvement and adoption of generative machine learning models is rapidly accelerating, as exemplified by the popularity of LLMs (Large Language Models) for text, and diffusion models for image generation. As generative models become…
The inference of causal relationships using observational data from partially observed multivariate systems with hidden variables is a fundamental question in many scientific domains. Methods extracting causal information from conditional…
The information bottleneck principle is an elegant and useful approach to representation learning. In this paper, we investigate the problem of representation learning in the context of reinforcement learning using the information…
Underpinning the past decades of work on the design, initialization, and optimization of neural networks is a seemingly innocuous assumption: that the network is trained on a \textit{stationary} data distribution. In settings where this…
Neural collapse ($\mathcal{NC}$) is a phenomenon observed in classification tasks where top-layer representations collapse into their class means, which become equinorm, equiangular and aligned with the classifiers. These behaviours --…
A quadratic approximation of neural network loss landscapes has been extensively used to study the optimization process of these networks. Though, it usually holds in a very small neighborhood of the minimum, it cannot explain many…
Neural collapse (NC) refers to the surprising structure of the last layer of deep neural networks in the terminal phase of gradient descent training. Recently, an increasing amount of experimental evidence has pointed to the propagation of…
Extracting relevant information from data is crucial for all forms of learning. The information bottleneck (IB) method formalizes this, offering a mathematically precise and conceptually appealing framework for understanding learning…
Unlike primates, training artificial neural networks on changing data distributions leads to a rapid decrease in performance on old tasks. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we investigate the…
The training dynamics and generalization properties of neural networks (NN) can be precisely characterized in function space via the neural tangent kernel (NTK). Structural changes to the NTK during training reflect feature learning and…
What happens when generative machine learning models are pretrained on web-scale datasets containing data generated by earlier models? Some prior work warns of "model collapse" as the web is overwhelmed by synthetic data; other work…