arXiv:2606. 04476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the gradient descent dynamics for jointly training both layers of a one-hidden-layer ReLU network to fit a linear target function.
arXiv:2607. 03613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the implicit bias of noisy stochastic gradient descent in training wide two-layer ReLU networks for multivariate regression.
arXiv:2301. 06308v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains.
arXiv:2505. 22578v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The optimization of neural networks under weight decay remains poorly understood from a theoretical standpoint.
AYLA is a loss reparameterization framework that applies a sigmoid‑controlled power‑law transformation to the empirical loss, dynamically adjusting gradient magnitudes without changing stationary points or optimal solutions. By reshaping optimization trajectories, AYLA accelerates descent in flat or saddle‑dominated regions and stabilizes late‑stage training, leading to improved feature recovery in two‑layer tanh networks on synthetic Gaussian data. Experiments show enhanced weight alignment, neuron similarity, activation correlation, and richer internal representations, while mitigating rank collapse and promoting a transition from lazy to active feature‑learning regimes.
arXiv:2605. 10775v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A surprising phenomenon in the training of neural networks is the ability of gradient descent to find global minimizers of the training loss despite its non-convexity.
arXiv:2606. 30384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training in artificial neural networks can be viewed as a trajectory evolving through a high-dimensional loss landscape.
arXiv:2607. 08843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In artificial and biological neural networks, concepts are often encoded as consistent linear directions in representation space.
arXiv:2606. 00340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study optimal learning-rate selection in two-layer and three-layer linear neural networks trained to learn linear target functions.
The paper investigates how two‑layer polynomial‑width neural networks learn orthogonal multi‑index targets under standard initialization. It shows that incremental learning still occurs: the loss decreases sequentially following the Hermite expansion, with lower‑order components learned first. The dynamics also exhibit a competitive reallocation of parameter mass, shifting into the target subspace and concentrating on aligned neurons. The analysis uses a symmetry‑based finite‑width approximation and demonstrates that vanilla gradient descent displays the same qualitative behavior.
arXiv:2608. 04382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent has been of particular interest in modern machine learning beyond sole focus on optimization.
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.
The paper introduces the "lift" technique for training input‑convex neural networks, replacing the traditional non‑negative weight constraint enforced by projected gradient descent or a softplus map. By adding a learnable slack variable and an unconstrained network that processes a permutation‑invariant batch summary, the lift couples batch‑dependent latent weights to the gradient, increasing update variance and enabling faster escape from the softplus shoulder. Experiments show that when the softplus method stalls at the shoulder, the lift achieves tighter fits and reconstructs targets roughly three times faster, while both methods agree when the shoulder is rarely reached.