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1. Neural Networks can Learn Representations with Gradient Descent

   Damian, Alexandru ; Lee, Jason D. ; Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi ( July 2022 , Proceedings of Thirty Fifth Conference on Learning Theory)

   Loh, Po-ling ; Raginsky, Maxim (Ed.)

   Significant theoretical work has established that in specific regimes, neural networks trained by gradient descent behave like kernel methods. However, in practice, it is known that neural networks strongly outperform their associated kernels. In this work, we explain this gap by demonstrating that there is a large class of functions which cannot be efficiently learned by kernel methods but can be easily learned with gradient descent on a two layer neural network outside the kernel regime by learning representations that are relevant to the target task. We also demonstrate that these representations allow for efficient transfer learning, which is impossible in the kernel regime. Specifically, we consider the problem of learning polynomials which depend on only a few relevant directions, i.e. of the form f⋆(x)=g(Ux) where U:\Rd→\Rr with d≫r. When the degree of f⋆ is p, it is known that n≍dp samples are necessary to learn f⋆ in the kernel regime. Our primary result is that gradient descent learns a representation of the data which depends only on the directions relevant to f⋆. This results in an improved sample complexity of n≍d2 and enables transfer learning with sample complexity independent of d. 

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2. Neural Networks can Learn Representations with Gradient Descent

   Damian, Alex ; Lee, Jason ; Soltanolkotabi, Mahdi ( January 2022 , Advances in neural information processing systems)

   Significant theoretical work has established that in specific regimes, neural networks trained by gradient descent behave like kernel methods. However, in practice, it is known that neural networks strongly outperform their associated kernels. In this work, we explain this gap by demonstrating that there is a large class of functions which cannot be efficiently learned by kernel methods but can be easily learned with gradient descent on a two layer neural network outside the kernel regime by learning representations that are relevant to the target task. We also demonstrate that these representations allow for efficient transfer learning, which is impossible in the kernel regime. Specifically, we consider the problem of learning polynomials which depend on only a few relevant directions, i.e. of the form $f(x)=g(Ux)$ where $U: \R^d \to \R^r$ with $d≫r$. When the degree of f⋆ is p, it is known that n≍dp samples are necessary to learn f⋆ in the kernel regime. Our primary result is that gradient descent learns a representation of the data which depends only on the directions relevant to f. This results in an improved sample complexity of n≍d2r+drp. Furthermore, in a transfer learning setup where the data distributions in the source and target domain share the same representation U but have different polynomial heads we show that a popular heuristic for transfer learning has a target sample complexity independent of d. 

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3. Beyond Lazy Training for Over-parameterized Tensor Decomposition

   Wang, Xiang ; Wu, Chenwei ; Lee, Jason D ; Ma, Tengyu ; Ge, Rong ( January 2020 , NeurIPS)

   Over-parametrization is an important technique in training neural networks. In both theory and practice, training a larger network allows the optimization algorithm to avoid bad local optimal solutions. In this paper we study a closely related tensor decomposition problem: given an l-th order tensor in (Rd)⊗l of rank r (where r≪d), can variants of gradient descent find a rank m decomposition where m>r? We show that in a lazy training regime (similar to the NTK regime for neural networks) one needs at least m=Ω(dl−1), while a variant of gradient descent can find an approximate tensor when m=O∗(r2.5llogd). Our results show that gradient descent on over-parametrized objective could go beyond the lazy training regime and utilize certain low-rank structure in the data. 

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4. On Single-Index Models beyond Gaussian Data

   Bruna, Joan ; Pillaud-Vivien, Loucas ; Zweig, Aaron ( December 2023 , Neural Information Processing Systems)

   Sparse high-dimensional functions have arisen as a rich framework to study the behavior of gradient-descent methods using shallow neural networks, showcasing their ability to perform feature learning beyond linear models. Amongst those functions, the simplest are single-index models f(x) = φ(x · θ∗), where the labels are generated by an arbitrary non-linear scalar link function φ applied to an unknown one-dimensional projection θ∗ of the input data. By focusing on Gaussian data, several recent works have built a remarkable picture, where the so-called information exponent (related to the regularity of the link function) controls the required sample complexity. In essence, these tools exploit the stability and spherical symmetry of Gaussian distributions. In this work, building from the framework of [Ben Arous et al., 2021], we explore extensions of this picture beyond the Gaussian setting, where both stability or symmetry might be violated. Focusing on the planted setting where φ is known, our main results establish that Stochastic Gradient Descent can efficiently recover the unknown direction θ∗ in the high- dimensional regime, under assumptions that extend previous works [Yehudai and Shamir, 2020, Wu, 2022] 

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5. Efficient Algorithms for Least Square Piecewise Polynomial Regression

   Lokshtanov, Daniel ; Suri, Subhash ; Xue, Jie ( September 2021 , ESA21: Proceedings of European Symposium on Algorithms)

   null (Ed.)

   We present approximation and exact algorithms for piecewise regression of univariate and bivariate data using fixed-degree polynomials. Specifically, given a set S of n data points (x1, y1), . . . , (xn, yn) ∈ Rd × R where d ∈ {1, 2}, the goal is to segment xi’s into some (arbitrary) number of disjoint pieces P1, . . . , Pk, where each piece Pj is associated with a fixed-degree polynomial fj : Rd → R, to minimize the total loss function λk+􏰄ni=1(yi −f(xi))2, where λ ≥ 0 is a regularization term that penalizes model complexity (number of pieces) and f : 􏰇kj=1 Pj → R is the piecewise polynomial function defined as f|Pj = fj. The pieces P1,...,Pk are disjoint intervals of R in the case of univariate data and disjoint axis-aligned rectangles in the case of bivariate data. Our error approximation allows use of any fixed-degree polynomial, not just linear functions. Our main results are the following. For univariate data, we present a (1 + ε)-approximation algorithm with time complexity O(nε log1ε), assuming that data is presented in sorted order of xi’s. For bivariate data, we √ present three results: a sub-exponential exact algorithm with running time nO( n); a polynomial-time constant- approximation algorithm; and a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS). The bivariate case is believed to be NP-hard in the folklore but we could not find a published record in the literature, so in this paper we also present a hardness proof for completeness. 

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