A Counterexample to Fourier Alignment in Single-Neuron Modular Addition
arXiv:2608. 04451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a negative solution to MAIS-O60.
We give a negative solution to MAIS-O60. We first construct an example in which an initially active ReLU neuron becomes completely inactive in finite time and thereafter remains frozen at a limit whose Fourier energy is equally distributed among all nonzero real frequency classes.
arXiv:2608. 04451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a negative solution to MAIS-O60.
arXiv:2610. 11475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Population gradient flow is a common tool for reasoning about how neural networks adapt, including after pretraining.
Population gradient flow is a common tool for reasoning about how neural networks adapt, including after pretraining. We show that it can mispredict finite-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) qualitatively, and we trace the discrepancy to a specific mechanism.
The paper introduces a new method called uniform‑phase initialization for deep neural networks with sine activations, eliminating the need for the Central Limit Theorem and fully decoupling layers. This approach avoids distributional approximation errors and coupling between layers, leading to stable weight initialization. Experiments show that models using this initialization outperform state‑of‑the‑art methods on image and audio fitting tasks and remain competitive without tuning, while also supporting μP width scaling.
arXiv:2609. 12996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a full Adam theorem for spectral heavy-tail onset in a closed Gaussian Stein-Hermite teacher-student state-evolution model.
arXiv:2610. 31663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constructing accurate and computationally tractable approximation spaces is a fundamental task in scientific computing.
arXiv:2607. 04135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The remarkable ability of modern neural networks to generalize improves with increasing network capacity, even when the number of model parameters or effective degrees of freedom exceeds the number of training data points.
arXiv:2610.20439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study classification dynamics under small initialization and identify a pronounced non-monotone behavior of accuracy that we call the accuracy well:...
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.
The paper investigates how to reduce computation in neural networks by combining one‑shot magnitude pruning in a static setting with early exit in an adaptive setting. In a simplified single‑neuron model it proves a concentration theorem for pruning and introduces a conditional perceptron whose excess error decreases as a power of the compute gap, with the exponent increasing as partial and full computations align. The authors extend these results to deep networks, showing how pruning distortions accumulate with depth and deriving a compute‑accuracy trade‑off for frozen‑backbone early exit under a Gaussian process framework, with numerical simulations supporting the theoretical scaling laws.
The remarkable ability of modern neural networks to generalize improves with increasing network capacity, even when the number of model parameters or effective degrees of freedom exceeds the number of training data points. This phenomenon is all the more surprising given that generalization error diverges when the number of model parameters approaches a critical value from below.
The paper investigates why neural networks trained on modular addition tasks develop Fourier-structured representations that enable exact generalization. Using probability signatures, the authors show that leading gradient interactions are cyclic shift operators, which are diagonalized by the discrete Fourier transform, leading to decoupled Fourier-mode dynamics that explain Fourier sparsity, frequency matching, and phase alignment. The framework also clarifies how label noise can accelerate early loss decrease by increasing conditional label collisions, and it is demonstrated to predict frequency behavior in other operators such as XOR.