Early Directional Convergence in Deep Homogeneous Neural Networks for Small Initializations
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Abstract (arXiv)
This paper studies the gradient flow dynamics that arise when training deep homogeneous neural networks assumed to have locally Lipschitz gradients and an order of homogeneity strictly greater than two. It is shown here that for sufficiently small initializations, during the early stages of training, the weights of the neural network remain small in (Euclidean) norm and approximately converge in direction to the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points of the recently introduced neural correlation function. Additionally, this paper also studies the KKT points of the neural correlation function for feed-forward networks with (Leaky) ReLU and polynomial (Leaky) ReLU activations, deriving necessary and sufficient conditions for rank-one KKT points.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 33 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Mar 2024.
Builds on
33 of 40 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 3; 2026: 1.
6 papers.
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- 2024Towards Better Generalization: Weight Decay Induces Low-rank Bias for Neural Networkscited by 2
- 2024On Multi-Stage Loss Dynamics in Neural Networks: Mechanisms of Plateau and Descent Stagescited by 0
- 2026The Weight Gram Matrix Captures Sequential Feature Linearization in Deep Networks7 May 2026
- 2025From Condensation to Rank Collapse: A Two-Stage Analysis of Transformer Training Dynamics8 Oct 2025
- 2025Alternating Gradient Flows: A Theory of Feature Learning in Two-layer Neural Networks6 Jun 2025
- 2025An overview of condensation phenomenon in deep learning13 Apr 2025
- 2024On Multi-Stage Loss Dynamics in Neural Networks: Mechanisms of Plateau and Descent Stages26 Oct 2024
- 2024Towards Better Generalization: Weight Decay Induces Low-rank Bias for Neural Networks3 Oct 2024