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.
By Ali Siahkoohi
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.
By Berk Tinaz, Changzhi Xie, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
arXiv:2605. 08446v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bayesian neural networks are typically trained against the evidence lower bound (ELBO), whose Jensen gap closes only when the variational posterior is exact.
By Pavel Prochazka
arXiv:2607. 13380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically motivated alternative to backpropagation via local weight updates, yet routing error between layers still relies on an autograd Jacobian-transpose ($J^\top$) product - the last non-local operation in PC.
By Junlong Shen, Xingyu Li
arXiv:2605. 28983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, training a neural network is identified, exactly, as a search through Hamilton--Jacobi initial-value problems: each gradient step selects the initial data of a viscous Hamilton--Jacobi equation whose Hopf--Cole propagator best fits the observations; at inference, the input is the spatial point at which that solution is evaluated and the initial condition is already encoded in the weights.
By Jose Marie Antonio Mi\~noza, Erika Fille T. Legara, Christopher P. Monterola
The paper introduces HELLO, a hierarchical solver for large‑scale discrete optimal transport that reduces the problem to edge localization guided by dual potentials. HELLO uses a coarse‑to‑fine initialization across a recursive subsampling hierarchy and a refinement step that inserts the largest dual violators until a KKT residual tolerance is met, achieving linear memory usage. Experiments show that HELLO outperforms strong baselines by an order of magnitude in runtime while attaining lower transport objectives, and it scales to over a million samples in high‑dimensional settings, supporting various OT variants.
By Wenzhou Xia, Qiaoqiao Ding, Jingwei Liang, Xiaoqun Zhang
arXiv:2610. 09356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove global exponential (linear) convergence with an explicit rate in the rich scaling for wide two-layer linear networks trained with smooth Polyak-Lojasiewicz predictor losses.
By Stephen Y Zhang, Gabriel Peyr\'e
arXiv:2510. 02779v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances have significantly improved our understanding of the generalization performance of gradient descent (GD) methods in deep neural networks.
By Yuanfan Li, Yunwen Lei, Zheng-Chu Guo, Yiming Ying
arXiv:2609.25576v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study the estimation of a $K$-dimensional simplex from $N$ i.i.d.\ points sampled uniformly from its interior; the observations are convex combina...
By Jun LI, Yanlong Guo, Zhaozhao Zeng
arXiv:2607. 08380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An important quantity in the theory of gradient descent (GD) is the \emph{sharpness}, defined as the largest eigenvalue of the objective Hessian.
By Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, Ren\'e Vidal
arXiv:2608. 16760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable optimization is central to neural network (NN) training, yet Adam, the default optimizer for modern LLMs, rests on a fragile foundation.
By Yushun Zhang
arXiv:2605. 18528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized.
By Jiayu Zhang, Tianyi Lin