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Related papers: State-Space NTK Collapse Near Bifurcations

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The Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) characterizes how a model's state evolves over Gradient Descent. Computing the full NTK matrix is often infeasible, especially for recurrent architectures. Here, we introduce a matrix-free perspective, using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 James Hazelden

Neural network grokking -- the abrupt memorization-to-generalization transition -- challenges our understanding of learning dynamics. Through finite-size scaling of gradient avalanche dynamics across eight model scales, we find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Ping Wang

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable empirical success, yet their training dynamics remain understood mainly from optimization rather than statistical principles. Here we develop a statistical framework for DNN training in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Minhao Yao , Ruoyu Wang , Xihong Lin , Lin Liu , Zhonghua Liu

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have gained significant popularity thanks to their ability to learn using the well-known backpropagation algorithm. Conversely, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), despite having broader capabilities than ANNs,…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Sergio Davies , Andrew Gait , Andrew Rowley , Alessandro Di Nuovo

Understanding how deep neural networks learn remains a fundamental challenge in modern machine learning. A growing body of evidence suggests that training dynamics undergo a distinct phase transition, yet our understanding of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhanpeng Zhou , Yongyi Yang , Mahito Sugiyama , Junchi Yan

According to a popular viewpoint, neural networks learn from data by first identifying low-dimensional representations, and subsequently fitting the best model in this space. Recent works provide a formalization of this phenomenon when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Andrea Montanari , Zihao Wang

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) notoriously struggle to learn long-term memories, primarily due to vanishing and exploding gradients. The recent success of state-space models (SSMs), a subclass of RNNs, to overcome such difficulties…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Nicolas Zucchet , Antonio Orvieto

In recent years, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have demonstrated great successes in completing various Machine Learning tasks. We introduce a method for learning image features by \textit{locally connected layers} in SNNs using…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Daniel J. Saunders , Devdhar Patel , Hananel Hazan , Hava T. Siegelmann , Robert Kozma

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are brain-inspired models that enable energy-efficient implementation on neuromorphic hardware. However, the supervised training of SNNs remains a hard problem due to the discontinuity of the spiking neuron…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Mingqing Xiao , Qingyan Meng , Zongpeng Zhang , Yisen Wang , Zhouchen Lin

We study the dynamics of a neural network in function space when optimizing the mean squared error via gradient flow. We show that in the underparameterized regime the network learns eigenfunctions of an integral operator $T_{K^\infty}$…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-01-14 Benjamin Bowman , Guido Montufar

Information processing in the brain crucially depends on encoding properties of single neurons, with particular relevance of the spike-generation mechanism. The latter hinges upon the bifurcation type at the transition point between resting…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-05-10 Janina Hesse , Jan-Hendrik Schleimer , Susanne Schreiber

We analyze the generalization properties of two-layer neural networks in the neural tangent kernel (NTK) regime, trained with gradient descent (GD). For early stopped GD we derive fast rates of convergence that are known to be minimax…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-18 Mike Nguyen , Nicole Mücke

The spiking neural network (SNN), as a promising brain-inspired computational model with binary spike information transmission mechanism, rich spatially-temporal dynamics, and event-driven characteristics, has received extensive attention.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Yufei Guo , Xuhui Huang , Zhe Ma

We study how the optimization landscape of a neural network deforms as a non-linear activation is introduced through a smooth homotopy. Working first in an abstract local setting - a smooth one-parameter family of objective functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Michael Alexander

Bifurcation theory is a powerful tool for studying how the dynamics of a neural network model depends on its underlying neurophysiological parameters. However, bifurcation theory has been developed mostly for smooth dynamical systems and…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2019-01-16 Diego Fasoli , Stefano Panzeri

We identify and formalize a fundamental gradient descent phenomenon resulting in a learning proclivity in over-parameterized neural networks. Gradient Starvation arises when cross-entropy loss is minimized by capturing only a subset of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Mohammad Pezeshki , Sékou-Oumar Kaba , Yoshua Bengio , Aaron Courville , Doina Precup , Guillaume Lajoie

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

We consider the problem of approximating a function by an element of a nonlinear manifold which admits a differentiable parametrization, typical examples being neural networks with differentiable activation functions or tensor networks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Anthony Nouy , Agustín Somacal

We investigate recurrent neural networks with asymmetric interactions and demonstrate that the inclusion of self-couplings or sparse excitatory inter-module connections leads to the emergence of a densely connected manifold of dynamically…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-01 Davide Badalotti , Carlo Baldassi , Marc Mézard , Mattia Scardecchia , Riccardo Zecchina

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