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The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Satrajit Chatterjee , Piotr Zielinski

We study gradient flow on the multi-index regression problem for high-dimensional Gaussian data. Multi-index functions consist of a composition of an unknown low-rank linear projection and an arbitrary unknown, low-dimensional link…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-03 Alberto Bietti , Joan Bruna , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien

Linear layers in neural networks (NNs) trained by gradient descent can be expressed as a key-value memory system which stores all training datapoints and the initial weights, and produces outputs using unnormalised dot attention over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Kazuki Irie , Róbert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber

We study the problem of learning one-hidden-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function, where the inputs are sampled from standard Gaussian distribution and the outputs are generated from a noisy teacher…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-21 Xiao Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Lingxiao Wang , Quanquan Gu

We address the challenging problem of deep representation learning--the efficient adaption of a pre-trained deep network to different tasks. Specifically, we propose to explore gradient-based features. These features are gradients of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Fangzhou Mu , Yingyu Liang , Yin Li

Deep learning methods operate in regimes that defy the traditional statistical mindset. Neural network architectures often contain more parameters than training samples, and are so rich that they can interpolate the observed labels, even if…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-14 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari

Recent success in training deep neural networks have prompted active investigation into the features learned on their intermediate layers. Such research is difficult because it requires making sense of non-linear computations performed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Yixuan Li , Jason Yosinski , Jeff Clune , Hod Lipson , John Hopcroft

Deep learning's successes are often attributed to its ability to automatically discover new representations of the data, rather than relying on handcrafted features like other learning methods. We show, however, that deep networks learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Pedro Domingos

Machine learning methods are commonly used to solve inverse problems, wherein an unknown signal must be estimated from few indirect measurements generated via a known acquisition procedure. In particular, neural networks perform well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hannah Laus , Suzanna Parkinson , Vasileios Charisopoulos , Felix Krahmer , Rebecca Willett

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari , Phan-Minh Nguyen

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland

Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Alexander Tyurin

Gradient-based learning in multi-layer neural networks displays a number of striking features. In particular, the decrease rate of empirical risk is non-monotone even after averaging over large batches. Long plateaus in which one observes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Raphaël Berthier , Andrea Montanari , Kangjie Zhou

While it is commonly observed in practice that pruning networks to a certain level of sparsity can improve the quality of the features, a theoretical explanation of this phenomenon remains elusive. In this work, we investigate this by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-14 Nuri Mert Vural , Murat A. Erdogdu

Deep learning is also known as hierarchical learning, where the learner _learns_ to represent a complicated target function by decomposing it into a sequence of simpler functions to reduce sample and time complexity. This paper formally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li

Neural networks have many successful applications, while much less theoretical understanding has been gained. Towards bridging this gap, we study the problem of learning a two-layer overparameterized ReLU neural network for multi-class…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-02 Yuanzhi Li , Yingyu Liang

The ability of deep neural networks to generalise well even when they interpolate their training data has been explained using various "simplicity biases". These theories postulate that neural networks avoid overfitting by first learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Maria Refinetti , Alessandro Ingrosso , Sebastian Goldt

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

We perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Preetum Nakkiran , Gal Kaplun , Dimitris Kalimeris , Tristan Yang , Benjamin L. Edelman , Fred Zhang , Boaz Barak

In deep learning theory, a critical question is to understand how neural networks learn hierarchical features. In this work, we study the learning of hierarchical polynomials of \textit{multiple nonlinear features} using three-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Hengyu Fu , Zihao Wang , Eshaan Nichani , Jason D. Lee