arXiv AI By Thomas Hofmann

The Map Behind the Flow: Finite-Step Gradient Descent as a Dynamical System

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arXiv:2607. 04993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many phenomena of deep learning are dynamical: they concern not only which minima exist, but how gradient descent reaches, avoids, or selects among them.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.

By Hasan Amin, Wei-Kai Chang, Rajiv Khanna
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper investigates how normalization makes neural networks scale‑invariant, creating a feedback loop between learning‑rate schedules and weight decay that controls the effective step size of the optimizer. It derives an exact discrete‑time law showing that a single scalar quantity captures all schedule and decay effects, with norm growth providing a self‑quenching counter‑force that defines a sharp boundary between contraction‑ and expansion‑dominated regimes. Through exact analysis of a normalized regression model and experiments on MLPs, CNNs, GPT‑2, and various datasets, the authors demonstrate that constant learning rates with weight decay are intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics, and that adaptive optimizers exhibit weaker stabilization under normalization. "whyItMatters":"The study provides a precise, actionable rule for controlling training dynamics and schedule design in modern deep learning by isolating a single governing quantity for scale‑invariant optimization."

arXiv AI
Aug 6

The Hamilton-Jacobi Theory of Deep Learning

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