Related papers: Saddle-to-Saddle Dynamics Explains A Simplicity Bi…
Autoencoders are the simplest neural network for unsupervised learning, and thus an ideal framework for studying feature learning. While a detailed understanding of the dynamics of linear autoencoders has recently been obtained, the study…
Learning relies on coordinated synaptic changes in recurrently connected populations of neurons. Therefore, understanding the collective evolution of synaptic connectivity over learning is a key challenge in neuroscience and machine…
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…
Neural networks often exhibit simplicity bias, favoring simpler features over more complex ones, even when both are equally predictive. We introduce a novel method called imbalanced label coupling to explore and extend this simplicity bias…
Over the past few years, an extensively studied phenomenon in training deep networks is the implicit bias of gradient descent towards parsimonious solutions. In this work, we investigate this phenomenon by narrowing our focus to deep linear…
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,…
The remarkable generalization ability of neural networks is usually attributed to the implicit bias of SGD, which often yields models with lower complexity using simpler (e.g. linear) and low-rank features. Recent works have provided…
While gradient descent has proven highly successful in learning connection weights for neural networks, the actual structure of these networks is usually determined by hand, or by other optimization algorithms. Here we describe a simple…
When training deep neural networks with gradient descent, sharpness often increases -- a phenomenon known as progressive sharpening -- before saturating at the edge of stability. Although commonly observed in practice, the underlying…
The increasing complexity of deep learning architectures is resulting in training time requiring weeks or even months. This slow training is due in part to vanishing gradients, in which the gradients used by back-propagation are extremely…
Despite the widespread adoption of neural networks, their training dynamics remain poorly understood. We show experimentally that as the size of the dataset increases, a point forms where the magnitude of the gradient of the loss becomes…
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…
This paper examines gradient flow dynamics of two-homogeneous neural networks for small initializations, where all weights are initialized near the origin. For both square and logistic losses, it is shown that for sufficiently small…
The distributional simplicity bias (DSB) posits that neural networks learn low-order moments of the data distribution first, before moving on to higher-order correlations. In this work, we present compelling new evidence for the DSB by…
Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) trained on low-dimensional tasks have been widely used to model functional biological networks. However, the solutions found by learning and the effect of initial connectivity are not well understood. Here,…
Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…
Deep linear networks (DLNs) are used as an analytically tractable model of the training dynamics of deep neural networks. While gradient descent in DLNs is known to exhibit saddle-to-saddle dynamics, the impact of stochastic gradient…
Understanding the learning dynamics of neural networks is one of the key issues for the improvement of optimization algorithms as well as for the theoretical comprehension of why deep neural nets work so well today. In this paper, we…
Understanding how neural networks learn remains one of the central challenges in machine learning research. From random at the start of training, the weights of a neural network evolve in such a way as to be able to perform a variety of…
While attention-based models have demonstrated the remarkable ability of in-context learning (ICL), the theoretical understanding of how these models acquired this ability through gradient descent training is still preliminary. Towards…