arXiv Machine Learning

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606. 11123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 10

Rank Collapse, Fixed Points, and the Renormalization Group Structure of MLP Residual Networks

arXiv:2606. 10324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The analogy between deep neural network forward passes and renormalization group (RG) flows has been repeatedly noted in the literature, but existing treatments remain qualitative: depth is described as a coarse-graining scale, attention is likened to a partition function, and representations are said to flow toward fixed points.

By Parviz Haggi-Mani, Irina Rish
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

Rank Collapse, Fixed Points, and the Renormalization Group Structure of MLP Residual Networks

The analogy between deep neural network forward passes and renormalization group (RG) flows has been repeatedly noted in the literature, but existing treatments remain qualitative: depth is described as a coarse-graining scale, attention is likened to a partition function, and representations are said to flow toward fixed points. No existing work has defined a measurable RG order parameter, tested it under controlled variation of the input distribution, or made quantitative predictions that are empirically verified.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 15

Transforming Rank: How Architecture Navigates the Spectral Pathologies of Depth

We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization. We reinterpret skip connections and normalization, long understood as controlling magnitude, as mechanisms for preserving gradient rank across depth, since the very matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations that make the network expressive also reduce the rank.

arXiv AI
Jul 16

Reassessing Muon for Matrix Factorization

arXiv:2607. 13246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training.

By Ali Parviz, Gal Mishne, Alex Cloninger