arXiv:2510. 24616v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For four decades statistical physics has been providing a framework to analyse neural networks.
By Jean Barbier, Francesco Camilli, Minh-Toan Nguyen, Mauro Pastore, Rudy Skerk
arXiv:2501. 18530v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider a teacher-student model of supervised learning with a fully-trained two-layer neural network whose width $k$ and input dimension $d$ are large and proportional.
By Jean Barbier, Francesco Camilli, Minh-Toan Nguyen, Mauro Pastore, Rudy Skerk
The paper investigates how the geometry of teacher neural networks affects the learnability of student networks in teacher‑student setups. By formalizing learnability as the success rate of reaching the global minimum, the authors identify two teacher distributions—one maximizing node dissimilarity (easy) and one minimizing it (hard)—that lead to markedly different success rates across various settings and activation functions. They analyze the loss landscape of small networks, revealing two types of suboptimal local minima (out‑of‑bounds and interior) whose attraction regions depend on teacher structure, and demonstrate that adjusting learning rates for the readout layer and inner biases can improve success rates.
whyItMatters:"The study highlights that teacher geometry, often overlooked, plays a crucial role in determining how effectively a student network can learn, offering guidance for designing more realistic teacher‑student experiments."
By Kai J. Sandbrink, Flavio Martinelli, Alexander van Meegen, Wulfram Gerstner, Johanni Brea
arXiv:2605.12597v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Computational sampling has been central to the sciences since the mid-20th century. While machine-learning-based approaches have recently ena...
By Luca Maria Del Bono, Giulio Biroli, Patrick Charbonneau, Marylou Gabri\'e
arXiv:2610.01728v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Understanding loss landscapes is central to explaining neural-network training, yet their structure remains only partially understood even in simple...
By Jakob Paul Zimmermann, Moritz Grillo, Andrei Balakin, Georg Loho
arXiv:2610.00420v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A weight space network (or metanetwork) takes the weights of another neural network as input and predicts properties of it. Most prior work trains such...
By Yuxin Ma, Adir Dayan, Yam Eitan, Haggai Maron, Soledad Villar