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The training of neural networks is a complex, high-dimensional, non-convex and noisy optimization problem whose theoretical understanding is interesting both from an applicative perspective and for fundamental reasons. A core challenge is…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2023-04-19 Theo Jules , Gal Brener , Tal Kachman , Noam Levi , Yohai Bar-Sinai

Wider adoption of neural networks in many critical domains such as finance and healthcare is being hindered by the need to explain their predictions and to impose additional constraints on them. Monotonicity constraint is one of the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Davor Runje , Sharath M. Shankaranarayana

Fundamental limits to predictability are central to our understanding of many physical and computational systems. Here we show that, despite its remarkable capabilities, deep learning exhibits such fundamental limits rooted in the fractal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Andrew Ly , Pulin Gong

An acknowledged weakness of neural networks is their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations to the inputs. To improve the robustness of these models, one of the most popular defense mechanisms is to alternatively maximize the loss over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Zhun Deng , Hangfeng He , Jiaoyang Huang , Weijie J. Su

We analyze the optimization landscapes of deep learning with wide networks. We highlight the importance of constraints for such networks and show that constraint -- as well as unconstraint -- empirical-risk minimization over such networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-14 Johannes Lederer

We propose a network characterization of combinatorial fitness landscapes by adapting the notion of inherent networks proposed for energy surfaces. We use the well-known family of NK landscapes as an example. In our case the inherent…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-10-21 Sébastien Verel , Gabriela Ochoa , Marco Tomassini

Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to quickly change its predictions in response to new information, is essential for the adaptability and robustness of deep reinforcement learning systems. Deep neural networks are known to lose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Clare Lyle , Zeyu Zheng , Evgenii Nikishin , Bernardo Avila Pires , Razvan Pascanu , Will Dabney

Modern deep learning models are highly overparameterized, resulting in large sets of parameter configurations that yield the same outputs. A significant portion of this redundancy is explained by symmetries in the parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Bo Zhao , Robin Walters , Rose Yu

This paper investigates how the compositional structure of neural networks shapes their optimization landscape and training dynamics. We analyze the gradient flow associated with overparameterized optimization problems, which can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Arthur Castello Branco de Oliveira , Dhruv Jatkar , Eduardo Sontag

The local geometry of high dimensional neural network loss landscapes can both challenge our cherished theoretical intuitions as well as dramatically impact the practical success of neural network training. Indeed recent works have observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Stanislav Fort , Surya Ganguli

Neural network minima are often connected by curves along which train and test loss remain nearly constant, a phenomenon known as mode connectivity. While this property has enabled applications such as model merging and fine-tuning, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Bo Zhao , Nima Dehmamy , Robin Walters , Rose Yu

Understanding the optimization dynamics of neural networks is necessary for closing the gap between theory and practice. Stochastic first-order optimization algorithms are known to efficiently locate favorable minima in deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Charles Guille-Escuret , Hiroki Naganuma , Kilian Fatras , Ioannis Mitliagkas

Why do brains and deep networks converge on similar representations? Task-optimized artificial neural networks quantitatively predict primate ventral stream responses despite radically different substrates and optimization dynamics. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Christian Dittrich , Jennifer Flygare Kinne

Overparameterized models have proven to be powerful tools for solving various machine learning tasks. However, overparameterization often leads to a substantial increase in computational and memory costs, which in turn requires extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Soo Min Kwon , Zekai Zhang , Dogyoon Song , Laura Balzano , Qing Qu

Important insights towards the explainability of neural networks reside in the characteristics of their decision boundaries. In this work, we borrow tools from the field of adversarial robustness, and propose a new perspective that relates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Guillermo Ortiz-Jimenez , Apostolos Modas , Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli , Pascal Frossard

This research addresses the challenge of characterizing the complexity and unpredictability of basins within various dynamical systems. The main focus is on demonstrating the efficiency of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in this field.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 David Valle , Alexandre Wagemakers , Miguel A. F. Sanjuán

Despite the striking successes of deep neural networks trained with gradient-based optimization, these methods differ fundamentally from their biological counterparts. This gap raises key questions about how nature achieves robust,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Mattia Scardecchia

A fundamental challenge in understanding graph neural networks (GNNs) lies in characterizing their optimization dynamics and loss landscape geometry, critical for improving interpretability and robustness. While mode connectivity, a lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Bingheng Li , Zhikai Chen , Haoyu Han , Shenglai Zeng , Jingzhe Liu , Jiliang Tang

Equivariant neural networks have proven to be effective for tasks with known underlying symmetries. However, optimizing equivariant networks can be tricky and best training practices are less established than for standard networks. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 YuQing Xie , Tess Smidt

Training a neural network requires navigating a high-dimensional, non-convex loss surface to find parameters that minimize this loss. In many ways, it is surprising that optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and ADAM can reliably…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Conor Rowan , Finn Murphy-Blanchard