English
Related papers

Related papers: Sharp feature-learning transitions and Bayes-optim…

200 papers

In this manuscript, we investigate the problem of how two-layer neural networks learn features from data, and improve over the kernel regime, after being trained with a single gradient descent step. Leveraging the insight from (Ba et al.,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Hugo Cui , Luca Pesce , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Yue M. Lu , Lenka Zdeborová , Bruno Loureiro

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Mohammad Pezeshki , Amartya Mitra , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

Feature learning in neural networks is crucial for their expressive power and inductive biases, motivating various theoretical approaches. Some approaches describe network behavior after training through a change in kernel scale from…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-05-29 Noa Rubin , Kirsten Fischer , Javed Lindner , David Dahmen , Inbar Seroussi , Zohar Ringel , Michael Krämer , Moritz Helias

We analyze recurrent neural networks with diagonal hidden-to-hidden weight matrices, trained with gradient descent in the supervised learning setting, and prove that gradient descent can achieve optimality \emph{without} massive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

Many studies on scaling laws consider basic factors such as model size, model shape, dataset size, and compute power. These factors are easily tunable and represent the fundamental elements of any machine learning setup. But researchers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Pranshu Malviya , Arjun Vaithilingam Sudhakar

We carry out an information-theoretical analysis of a two-layer neural network trained from input-output pairs generated by a teacher network with matching architecture, in overparametrized regimes. Our results come in the form of bounds…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Francesco Camilli , Daria Tieplova , Jean Barbier

Understanding how convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can efficiently learn high-dimensional functions remains a fundamental challenge. A popular belief is that these models harness the local and hierarchical structure of natural data such…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Francesco Cagnetta , Alessandro Favero , Matthieu Wyart

Continual learning, the ability of a model to adapt to an ongoing sequence of tasks without forgetting earlier ones, is a central goal of artificial intelligence. To better understand its underlying mechanisms, we study the limitations of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Hossein Taheri , Avishek Ghosh , Arya Mazumdar

Despite recent efforts, neural networks still struggle to learn in non-stationary environments, and our understanding of catastrophic forgetting (CF) is far from complete. In this work, we perform a systematic study on the impact of model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Jacopo Graldi , Alessandro Breccia , Giulia Lanzillotta , Thomas Hofmann , Lorenzo Noci

We develop a solvable model of neural scaling laws beyond the kernel limit. Theoretical analysis of this model shows how performance scales with model size, training time, and the total amount of available data. We identify three scaling…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-07 Blake Bordelon , Alexander Atanasov , Cengiz Pehlevan

A key property of neural networks driving their success is their ability to learn features from data. Understanding feature learning from a theoretical viewpoint is an emerging field with many open questions. In this work we capture…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-05-20 Kirsten Fischer , Javed Lindner , David Dahmen , Zohar Ringel , Michael Krämer , Moritz Helias

Understanding the inductive bias and generalization properties of large overparametrized machine learning models requires to characterize the dynamics of the training algorithm. We study the learning dynamics of large two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-30 Andrea Montanari , Pierfrancesco Urbani

This paper analyzes the convergence and generalization of training a one-hidden-layer neural network when the input features follow the Gaussian mixture model consisting of a finite number of Gaussian distributions. Assuming the labels are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Hongkang Li , Shuai Zhang , Meng Wang

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Carlo Baldassi , Fabrizio Pittorino , Riccardo Zecchina

In deep learning, a central issue is to understand how neural networks efficiently learn high-dimensional features. To this end, we explore the gradient descent learning of a general Gaussian Multi-index model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Bohan Zhang , Zihao Wang , Hengyu Fu , Jason D. Lee

The population loss of trained deep neural networks often follows precise power-law scaling relations with either the size of the training dataset or the number of parameters in the network. We propose a theory that explains the origins of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-28 Yasaman Bahri , Ethan Dyer , Jared Kaplan , Jaehoon Lee , Utkarsh Sharma

Deep Neural Networks are well known for efficiently fitting training data, yet experiencing poor generalization capabilities whenever some kind of bias dominates over the actual task labels, resulting in models learning "shortcuts". In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-12 Pietro Morerio , Ruggero Ragonesi , Vittorio Murino

The push to train ever larger neural networks has motivated the study of initialization and training at large network width. A key challenge is to scale training so that a network's internal representations evolve nontrivially at all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Greg Yang , James B. Simon , Jeremy Bernstein

When and how can an attention mechanism learn to selectively attend to informative tokens, thereby enabling detection of weak, rare, and sparsely located features? We address these questions theoretically in a sparse-token classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Nicholas Barnfield , Hugo Cui , Yue M. Lu

A key property of neural networks is their capacity of adapting to data during training. Yet, our current mathematical understanding of feature learning and its relationship to generalization remain limited. In this work, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-25 Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Hugo Cui , Florent Krzakala , Yue M. Lu , Bruno Loureiro