The paper proposes a conjecture that composing a fixed number of distinct nonconstant polynomials with a generic high‑degree polynomial produces linearly independent polynomials, extending Newman–Slater’s theorem. The authors prove the conjecture for two polynomials and for any number when the degrees are bounded, and they show how these results explain the parameter symmetries of deep fully connected neural networks with generic polynomial activations. In particular, for architectures with layer‑specific activations of increasing degree, the conjecture’s proven cases fully characterize the parameter sets that yield the same end‑to‑end network function, and it also resolves the identifiability of shallow polynomial networks.
By Kathl\'en Kohn, Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Alex Massarenti, Massimiliano Mella
arXiv:2607. 20811v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In spite of the fundamental role of neural networks in contemporary machine learning research, our understanding of the computational complexity of optimally training neural networks remains incomplete even when dealing with the simplest kinds of activation functions.
By Cornelius Brand, Robert Ganian, Mathis Rocton
arXiv:2410. 00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions.
By Vahid Shahverdi, Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Kathl\'en Kohn
arXiv:2605. 29823v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep networks often exhibit a preference for "simple" solutions, and such a simplicity bias is widely believed to play a key role in generalization.
By Tianren Zhang, Xiangxin Li, Minghao Xiao, Guanyu Chen, Feng Chen
In spite of the fundamental role of neural networks in contemporary machine learning research, our understanding of the computational complexity of optimally training neural networks remains incomplete even when dealing with the simplest kinds of activation functions. Indeed, while there has been a number of very recent results that establish ever-tighter lower bounds for the problem under linear and ReLU activation functions, less progress has been made towards the identification of novel polynomial-time tractable network architectures.
arXiv:2606. 28464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the optimization of neural networks, gradient dynamics are influenced by critical points that arise from the model's architecture.
By Kathl\'en Kohn, Giovanni Luca Marchetti, Farhan Shabir, Vahid Shahverdi, Weisheng Wang