arXiv Machine Learning

Can Stationary Distributions of Scale-Invariant Neural Networks Be Described by the Thermodynamics of an Ideal Gas?

arXiv:2511. 07308v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the training dynamics of deep neural networks remains a major open problem, with physics-inspired approaches offering promising insights.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Revisiting the Volume Hypothesis

arXiv:2606. 31282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep neural networks often contain far more parameters than needed to fit their training data, yet they achieve impressive generalization.

By Ari Pakman, Lior Kreimer, Yakir Berchenko
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper investigates how normalization makes neural networks scale‑invariant, creating a feedback loop between learning‑rate schedules and weight decay that controls the effective step size of the optimizer. It derives an exact discrete‑time law showing that a single scalar quantity captures all schedule and decay effects, with norm growth providing a self‑quenching counter‑force that defines a sharp boundary between contraction‑ and expansion‑dominated regimes. Through exact analysis of a normalized regression model and experiments on MLPs, CNNs, GPT‑2, and various datasets, the authors demonstrate that constant learning rates with weight decay are intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics, and that adaptive optimizers exhibit weaker stabilization under normalization. "whyItMatters":"The study provides a precise, actionable rule for controlling training dynamics and schedule design in modern deep learning by isolating a single governing quantity for scale‑invariant optimization."

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.

By Hasan Amin, Wei-Kai Chang, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Learning rate adaptive stochastic gradient descent optimization methods: numerical simulations for deep learning methods for partial differential equations and convergence analyses

arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).

By Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Adrian Riekert