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Variants dropout methods have been designed for the fully-connected layer, convolutional layer and recurrent layer in neural networks, and shown to be effective to avoid overfitting. As an appealing alternative to recurrent and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-29 Lin Zehui , Pengfei Liu , Luyao Huang , Junkun Chen , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang

In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Karan Bali , Jack Stanley , Praneet Suresh , Danilo Bzdok

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

Recent works have shown that transformers can solve contextual reasoning tasks by internally executing computational graphs called circuits. Circuits often use attention to logically match information from subspaces of the representation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Stephen Menary , Samuel Kaski , Andre Freitas

Deep neural networks' remarkable ability to correctly fit training data when optimized by gradient-based algorithms is yet to be fully understood. Recent theoretical results explain the convergence for ReLU networks that are wider than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Asaf Noy , Yi Xu , Yonathan Aflalo , Lihi Zelnik-Manor , Rong Jin

In many recent works, multi-layer perceptions (MLPs) have been shown to be suitable for modeling complex spatially-varying functions including images and 3D scenes. Although the MLPs are able to represent complex scenes with unprecedented…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Animesh Karnewar , Tobias Ritschel , Oliver Wang , Niloy J. Mitra

We study the problem of PAC learning one-hidden-layer ReLU networks with $k$ hidden units on $\mathbb{R}^d$ under Gaussian marginals in the presence of additive label noise. For the case of positive coefficients, we give the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Vasilis Kontonis , Nikos Zarifis

The dominant paradigm in modern neural networks relies on simple, monotonically-increasing activation functions like ReLU. While effective, this paradigm necessitates large, massively-parameterized models to approximate complex functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Shiko Kudo

Recent papers on the theory of representation learning has shown the importance of a quantity called diversity when generalizing from a set of source tasks to a target task. Most of these papers assume that the function mapping shared…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-01 Ziping Xu , Ambuj Tewari

Self-attention is a key enabler of state-of-art accuracy for various transformer-based Natural Language Processing models. This attention mechanism calculates a correlation score for each word with respect to the other words in a sentence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Zheng Li , Soroush Ghodrati , Amir Yazdanbakhsh , Hadi Esmaeilzadeh , Mingu Kang

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Harshwardhan Fartale , Ashish Kattamuri , Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats , Ishita Prasad , Akshata Kishore Moharir

Transformer networks have achieved remarkable empirical success across a wide range of applications, yet their theoretical expressive power remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the expressive capabilities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Linyan Gu , Lihua Yang , Feng Zhou

In this paper we are concerned with the approximation of functions by single hidden layer neural networks with ReLU activation functions on the unit circle. In particular, we are interested in the case when the number of data-points exceeds…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2021-04-02 Benny Avelin , Vesa Julin

We investigate the implications of removing bias in ReLU networks regarding their expressivity and learning dynamics. We first show that two-layer bias-free ReLU networks have limited expressivity: the only odd function two-layer bias-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Yedi Zhang , Andrew Saxe , Peter E. Latham

Previous work has questioned the conditions under which the decision regions of a neural network are connected and further showed the implications of the corresponding theory to the problem of adversarial manipulation of classifiers. It has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-28 Trung Le , Dinh Phung

Assessing the complexity of functions computed by a neural network helps us understand how the network will learn and generalize. One natural measure of complexity is how the network distorts length - if the network takes a unit-length…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-24 Boris Hanin , Ryan Jeong , David Rolnick

Deep neural networks with rectified linear units (ReLU) are getting more and more popular due to their universal representation power and successful applications. Some theoretical progress regarding the approximation power of deep ReLU…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-02-28 Bo Li , Shanshan Tang , Haijun Yu

LayerNorm is a critical component in modern large language models (LLMs) for stabilizing training and ensuring smooth optimization. However, it introduces significant challenges in mechanistic interpretability, outlier feature suppression,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Nandan Kumar Jha , Brandon Reagen

We establish the fundamental limits in the approximation of Lipschitz functions by deep ReLU neural networks with finite-precision weights. Specifically, three regimes, namely under-, over-, and proper quantization, in terms of minimax…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-06 Weigutian Ou , Philipp Schenkel , Helmut Bölcskei