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Spectral bias is a significant phenomenon in neural network training and can be explained by neural tangent kernel (NTK) theory. In this work, we develop the NTK theory for deep neural networks with physics-informed loss, providing insights…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Weiye Gan , Yicheng Li , Qian Lin , Zuoqiang Shi

There currently exist two extreme viewpoints for neural network feature learning -- (i) Neural networks simply implement a kernel method (a la NTK) and hence no features are learned (ii) Neural networks can represent (and hence learn)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Mahesh Lorik Yadav , Harish Guruprasad Ramaswamy , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan

In recent years neural networks have achieved impressive results on many technological and scientific tasks. Yet, the mechanism through which these models automatically select features, or patterns in data, for prediction remains unclear.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Daniel Beaglehole , Parthe Pandit , Mikhail Belkin

Sequential training from task to task is becoming one of the major objects in deep learning applications such as continual learning and transfer learning. Nevertheless, it remains unclear under what conditions the trained model's…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-21 Ryo Karakida , Shotaro Akaho

Neural networks outperform kernel methods, sometimes by orders of magnitude, e.g. on staircase functions. This advantage stems from the ability of neural networks to learn features, adapting their hidden representations to better capture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Niclas Alexander Göring , Charles London , Abdurrahman Hadi Erturk , Chris Mingard , Yoonsoo Nam , Ard A. Louis

Neural networks often rely on spurious shortcuts for many epochs before discovering structured representations. However, the mechanism governing when this transition occurs and whether its timing can be predicted remains unclear. Prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Truong Xuan Khanh , Truong Quynh Hoa

A recent breakthrough in deep learning theory shows that the training of over-parameterized deep neural networks can be characterized by a kernel function called \textit{neural tangent kernel} (NTK). However, it is known that this type of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Zixiang Chen , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu , Tong Zhang

Recent studies have noted an intriguing phenomenon termed Neural Collapse, that is, when the neural networks establish the right correlation between feature spaces and the training targets, their last-layer features, together with the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yining Wang , Junjie Sun , Chenyue Wang , Mi Zhang , Min Yang

In this work, we investigate the generalization properties of random feature methods. Our analysis extends prior results for Tikhonov regularization to a broad class of spectral regularization techniques and further generalizes the setting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Mike Nguyen , Nicole Mücke

An intriguing phenomenon observed during training neural networks is the spectral bias, which states that neural networks are biased towards learning less complex functions. The priority of learning functions with low complexity might be at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Yuan Cao , Zhiying Fang , Yue Wu , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to shortcut learning: rather than learning the intended task, they tend to draw inconclusive relationships between their inputs and outputs. Shortcut learning is ubiquitous among many failure cases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Hadi M. Dolatabadi , Sarah M. Erfani , Christopher Leckie

State-of-the-art neural networks are heavily over-parameterized, making the optimization algorithm a crucial ingredient for learning predictive models with good generalization properties. A recent line of work has shown that in a certain…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-01 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

While random Fourier features are a classic tool in kernel methods, their utility as a pre-processing step for deep learning on tabular data has been largely overlooked. Motivated by shortcomings in tabular deep learning pipelines -…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Renat Sergazinov , Jing Wu , Shao-An Yin

We consider gradient-based optimisation of wide, shallow neural networks, where the output of each hidden node is scaled by a positive parameter. The scaling parameters are non-identical, differing from the classical Neural Tangent Kernel…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-19 Francois Caron , Fadhel Ayed , Paul Jung , Hoil Lee , Juho Lee , Hongseok Yang

In wide neural networks, the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) remains approximately constant during training, providing a powerful theoretical tool for studying training dynamics, generalization, and connections to kernel methods. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jonathan Plenk , Sergio Calvo-Ordonez , Alvaro Cartea , Yarin Gal , Mark van der Wilk , Kamil Ciosek

Two key challenges facing modern deep learning are mitigating deep networks' vulnerability to adversarial attacks and understanding deep learning's generalization capabilities. Towards the first issue, many defense strategies have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Noel Loo , Ramin Hasani , Alexander Amini , Daniela Rus

Recent theoretical works based on the neural tangent kernel (NTK) have shed light on the optimization and generalization of over-parameterized networks, and partially bridge the gap between their practical success and classical learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-10 Kyung-Su Kim , Aurélie C. Lozano , Eunho Yang

Recently, neural networks utilizing periodic activation functions have been proven to demonstrate superior performance in vision tasks compared to traditional ReLU-activated networks. However, there is still a limited understanding of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Hemanth Saratchandran , Shin-Fang Chng , Simon Lucey

Feature extraction - the ability to identify relevant properties of data - is a key factor underlying the success of deep learning. Yet, it has proved difficult to elucidate its nature within existing predictive theories, to the extent that…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-08-29 Andrea Corti , Rosalba Pacelli , Pietro Rotondo , Marco Gherardi

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are demonstrating remarkable promise in integrating physical models with gappy and noisy observational data, but they still struggle in cases where the target functions to be approximated exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-16 Sifan Wang , Hanwen Wang , Paris Perdikaris