The Spectrum of Fisher Information of Deep Networks Achieving Dynamical Isometry
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Abstract (arXiv)
The Fisher information matrix (FIM) is fundamental to understanding the trainability of deep neural nets (DNN), since it describes the parameter space's local metric. We investigate the spectral distribution of the conditional FIM, which is the FIM given a single sample, by focusing on fully-connected networks achieving dynamical isometry. Then, while dynamical isometry is known to keep specific backpropagated signals independent of the depth, we find that the parameter space's local metric linearly depends on the depth even under the dynamical isometry. More precisely, we reveal that the conditional FIM's spectrum concentrates around the maximum and the value grows linearly as the depth increases. To examine the spectrum, considering random initialization and the wide limit, we construct an algebraic methodology based on the free probability theory. As a byproduct, we provide an analysis of the solvable spectral distribution in two-hidden-layer cases. Lastly, experimental results verify that the appropriate learning rate for the online training of DNNs is in inverse proportional to depth, which is determined by the conditional FIM's spectrum.
Key facts. Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 14 Jun 2020.
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Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 1; 2023: 1; 2024: 0; 2025: 4; 2026: 1.
9 papers.
- 2021Deformed semicircle law and concentration of nonlinear random matrices for ultra-wide neural networkscited by 21
- 2021Asymptotic Freeness of Layerwise Jacobians Caused by Invariance of Multilayer Perceptron: The Haar Orthogonal Casecited by 5
- 2023Efficient Activation Function Optimization through Surrogate Modelingcited by 5
- 2022Dynamical Isometry for Residual Networkscited by 0
- 2025Free Random Projection for In-Context Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
- 2025Lost in Retraining: Roaming the Parameter Space of Exponential Families Under Closed-Loop Learningcited by 0
- 2025Gaussian Equivalence for Self-Attention: Asymptotic Spectral Analysis of Attention Matrixcited by 0
- 2025Fisher Information, Training and Bias in Fourier Regression Modelscited by 0
- 2026Input-Dependent Fisher Information for Local Sensitivity Analysis of Medical Image Classifierscited by 0
- 2026Input-Dependent Fisher Information for Local Sensitivity Analysis of Medical Image Classifiers15 Jun 2026
- 2025Fisher Information, Training and Bias in Fourier Regression Models8 Oct 2025
- 2025Gaussian Equivalence for Self-Attention: Asymptotic Spectral Analysis of Attention Matrix8 Oct 2025
- 2025Lost in Retraining: Roaming the Parameter Space of Exponential Families Under Closed-Loop Learning25 Jun 2025
- 2025Free Random Projection for In-Context Reinforcement Learning9 Apr 2025
- 2023Efficient Activation Function Optimization through Surrogate Modeling13 Jan 2023
- 2022Dynamical Isometry for Residual Networks5 Oct 2022
- 2021Deformed semicircle law and concentration of nonlinear random matrices for ultra-wide neural networks20 Sep 2021
- 2021Asymptotic Freeness of Layerwise Jacobians Caused by Invariance of Multilayer Perceptron: The Haar Orthogonal Case24 Mar 2021