The implementations of the experiments on ABC and FTDC datasets are similar. For the stability analysis, we are interested in the norm of term 1. In Section E.1, we briefly discuss the motivation behind studying age prediction and PCA-based statistical analysis in this context. In Section E.2, we provide additional details on cortical thickness data acquisition. In Section E.3, we report the results for stability analysis of VNNs and PCA-regression models for FTDC100 ( In Section E.4, we study the stability of VNNs on two simulated In Section E.5, we include additional figures A promising application of brain age prediction is early detection of neurodegenerative diseases (such as Alzheimer's, Huntingson's disease) which may manifest themselves as error in age prediction in pathological contexts by machine learning models trained E.4 Stability of VNNs on Synthetic Data We consider two settings for synthetic data.

We study the eigenvalue distributions of the Conjugate Kernel and Neural Tangent Kernel associated to multi-layer feedforward neural networks. In an asymptotic regime where network width is increasing linearly in sample size, under random initialization of the weights, and for input samples satisfying a notion of approximate pairwise orthogonality, we show that the eigenvalue distributions of the CK and NTK converge to deterministic limits. The limit for the CK is described by iterating the Marcenko-Pastur map across the hidden layers. The limit for the NTK is equivalent to that of a linear combination of the CK matrices across layers, and may be described by recursive fixed-point equations that extend this Marcenko-Pastur map. We demonstrate the agreement of these asymptotic predictions with the observed spectra for both synthetic and CIFAR-10 training data, and we perform a small simulation to investigate the evolutions of these spectra over training.

We introduce a novel regularization scheme for autoencoders based on matricial free energy. Our approach defines a differentiable loss function in terms of the singular values of the code matrix (code dimension x batch size). From the standpoint of free probability an d random matrix theory, this loss achieves its minimum when the singular value distribution of the code matrix coincides with that of an appropriately sculpted random metric with i.i.d. Gaussian entries. Empirical simulations demonstrate that minimizing the negative matricial free energy through standard stochastic gradient-based training yields Gaussian-like codes that generalize across training and test sets. Building on this foundation, we propose a matricidal free energy maximizing autoencoder that reliably produces Gaussian codes and show its application to underdetermined inverse problems.