arXiv Machine Learning By Akshay Kumar, Jarvis Haupt

Learning Neural Networks by Neuron Pursuit

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arXiv:2509. 12154v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The first part of this paper studies the evolution of gradient flow for homogeneous neural networks near a class of saddle points exhibiting a sparsity structure.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Learning Orthogonal Multi-Index Models Beyond Small Initialization: Incremental Learning, Competitive Dynamics and Symmetry

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.

By Mo Zhou, Weihang Xu, Simon S. Du, Maryam Fazel