initialization
Uniform-in-time Propagation-of-Chaos for Stein Variational Gradient Descent
Balasubramanian, Krishnakumar, Banerjee, Sayan, Korba, Anna
We study uniform-in-time propagation-of-chaos for continuous-time Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). Classical finite-time propagation-of-chaos estimates for mean-field systems typically deteriorate rapidly with time and therefore do not directly explain the long-time relation between the finite-particle system and its mean-field limit. We obtain two complementary classes of uniform-in-time propagation-of-chaos results. For broad distributional metrics, we introduce a cutoff strategy which combines finite-time propagation-of-chaos estimates up to an $N$-dependent horizon with independent quantitative long-time convergence estimates for the finite-particle and mean-field SVGD flows. This yields uniform-in-averaging-time propagation-of-chaos bounds in Langevin kernel Stein discrepancy, Wasserstein-1 distance, and Wasserstein-2 distance, with logarithmic or iterated-logarithmic rates depending on the metric, target and kernel class. We also develop a finite-dimensional theory for matrix-valued finite-rank kernels. For Gaussian targets with bilinear kernels, the SVGD dynamics close exactly on first and second moments, yielding genuine uniform-in-physical-time parametric propagation-of-chaos rates in finite-dimensional Stein-feature metrics. We then prove a conjugacy principle showing that these feature-level estimates transfer to conjugate target-kernel pairs under orientation-preserving diffeomorphisms, thereby extending the theory to broad classes of nonlinear, including multimodal, targets. Together, these results highlight the contrast between generic distributional metrics, for which our general approach yields logarithmic rates, and closed finite-dimensional Stein observables, for which parametric $N^{-1/2}$ propagation-of-chaos rates persist uniformly in time.
What Drives the Inlier-Memorization Effect? A Theory of Outlier Detection via Early Training Dynamics
Outlier detection (OD) aims to identify anomalous instances by learning the underlying structure of normal data (inliers), and is particularly challenging in fully unsupervised settings where no information about anomalies is available during training. Recent advances have leveraged the inlier-memorization (IM) effect, a phenomenon in which deep models memorize inlier patterns earlier than those of outliers, as a powerful signal for distinguishing outliers. However, despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of the IM effect remains limited. In this work, we present a theoretical study of the IM effect. Focusing on a simple autoencoder, we show that, under mild assumptions, the model can successfully memorize inliers while failing to memorize outliers during certain stages of early training. In particular, we characterize not only the emergence of the IM effect, but also its strength and persistence, and analyze how these properties depend on the data distribution and parameter initialization. In addition, building on these insights, we derive simple yet practical guidelines for enhancing the IM effect, including data preprocessing and parameter initialization schemes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the ADBench datasets. Our findings provide a theoretical foundation for the IM effect and offer actionable directions for improving IM-based outlier detection methods.
S-GAI: Spectral Geometry-Aware Initialization for Sigmoidal MLPs -- From Dataset Geometry to Network Weights
Classical universal approximation theorems establish the expressive power of sigmoidal multilayer perceptrons, but they do not prescribe how initial weights should encode the geometry of a data distribution. We propose S-GAI, a spectral geometry-aware initialization framework for one-hidden-layer sigmoidal MLPs. Starting from the constructive idea that sigmoid units can act as smooth half-space gates, we move from hand-specified planar geometry to class-wise spectral geometry estimated from image data. For each class, SVD provides a mean, principal directions, and spectral scales. An energy threshold selects the retained directions, and each retained direction is represented by two sigmoid gates. These class-specific gates form a shared hidden layer initialized directly from the training set. We also formulate a SVD-based subspace classifier as a non-neural geometric reference, which tests whether the estimated spectral class geometry is already discriminative before being embedded into the MLP. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and a more challenging CIFAR-10 test show that the S-GAI-initialized MLP starts from a substantially more informative hidden state than Xavier initialization and reaches comparable final accuracy under full training. When the hidden layer is frozen, training only the output layer still gives stronger performance than frozen random gates, providing evidence that S-GAI effectively embeds class-wise spectral geometry into the MLP.
An Analytical Theory of Spectral Bias in the Learning Dynamics of Diffusion Models
We develop an analytical framework for understanding how the generated distribution evolves during diffusion model training. Leveraging a Gaussian-equivalence principle, we solve the full-batch gradient-flow dynamics of linear and convolutional denoisers and integrate the resulting probability-flow ODE, yielding analytic expressions for the generated distribution. The theory exposes a universal inverse-variance spectral law: the time for an eigen-or Fourier mode to match its target variance scales as ฯ ฮป 1, so high-variance (coarse) structure is mastered orders of magnitude sooner than low-variance (fine) detail. Extending the analysis to deep linear networks and circulant full-width convolutions shows that weight sharing merely multiplies learning rates--accelerating but not eliminating the bias--whereas local convolution introduces a qualitatively different bias. Experiments on Gaussian and natural-image datasets confirm the spectral law persists in deep MLP-based UNet.
TITAN: ATrajectory-Informed Technique for Adaptive Parameter Freezing in Large-Scale VQE
Variational quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a leading candidate for harnessing quantum computers to advance quantum chemistry and materials simulations, yet its training efficiency deteriorates rapidly for large Hamiltonians. Two issues underlie this bottleneck: (i) the no-cloning theorem imposes a linear growth in circuit evaluations with the number of parameters per gradient step; and (ii) deeper circuits encounter barren plateaus (BPs), leading to exponentially increasing measurement overheads. To address these challenges, here we propose a deep learning framework, dubbed TITAN, which identifies and freezes inactive parameters of a given ansรคtze at initialization for a specific class of Hamiltonians, reducing the optimization overhead without sacrificing accuracy. The motivation of TITAN starts with our empirical findings that a subset of parameters consistently has negligible influence on training dynamics. Its design combines a theoretically grounded data construction strategy, ensuring each training example is informative and BP-resilient, with an adaptive neural architecture that generalizes across ansรคtze of varying sizes. Across benchmark transverse-field Ising models, Heisenberg models, and multiple molecule systems up to 30qubits, TITAN achieves up to 3 faster convergence and 40-60%fewer circuit evaluations than state-of-the-art baselines, while matching or surpassing their estimation accuracy. By proactively trimming parameter space, TITAN lowers hardware demands and offers a scalable path toward utilizing VQE to advance practical quantum chemistry and materials science.
Quantitative convergence of trained single layer neural networks to Gaussian processes
In this paper, we study the quantitative convergence of shallow neural networks trained via gradient descent to their associated Gaussian processes in the infinitewidth limit. While previous work has established qualitative convergence under broad settings, precise, finite-width estimates remain limited, particularly during training. We provide explicit upper bounds on the quadratic Wasserstein distance between the network output and its Gaussian approximation at any training time t 0, demonstrating polynomial decay with network width. Our results quantify how architectural parameters, such as width and input dimension, influence convergence, and how training dynamics affect the approximation error.
Temperature is All You Need for Generalization in Langevin Dynamics and other Markov Processes
We analyze the generalization gap (gap between the training and test errors) when training a potentially over-parametrized model using a Markovian stochastic training algorithm, initialized from some distribution ฮธ0 p0. We focus on Langevin dynamics with a positive temperature ฮฒ 1, i.e. gradient descent on a training loss Lwith infinitesimal step size, perturbed with ฮฒ 1-variances Gaussian noise, and lightly regularized or bounded. There, we bound the generalization gap, at any time during training, by p (ฮฒEL(ฮธ0)+ln(1/ฮด))/N with probability 1 ฮด over the dataset, where N is the sample size, and EL(ฮธ0) = O(1)with standard initialization scaling. In contrast to previous guarantees, we have no dependence on either training time or reliance on mixing, nor a dependence on dimensionality, gradient norms, or any other properties of the loss or model. This guarantee follows from a general analysis of any Markov process-based training that has a Gibbs-style stationary distribution. The proof is surprisingly simple, once we observe that the marginal distribution divergence from initialization remains bounded, as implied by a generalized second law of thermodynamics.
Reparameterized LLMTraining via Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation
While Large language models (LLMs) are driving the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, effectively and reliably training these large models remains one of the field's most significant challenges. To address this challenge, we propose POET, a novel reParameterized training algorithm that uses Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation to optimize neurons. Specifically, POET reparameterizes each neuron with two learnable orthogonal matrices and a fixed random weight matrix. Because of its provable preservation of spectral properties of weight matrices, POET can stably optimize the objective function with improved generalization. We further develop efficient approximations that make POET flexible and scalable for training large-scale neural networks.
Structured Initialization for Vision Transformers
In this paper, we propose integrating this inductive bias into ViTs, not through an architectural intervention but solely through initialization. The motivation here is to have a ViT that can enjoy strong CNN-like performance when data assets are small, but can still scale to ViTlike performance as the data expands. Our approach is motivated by our empirical results that random impulse filters can achieve commensurate performance to learned filters within a CNN. We improve upon current ViT initialization strategies, which typically rely on empirical heuristics such as using attention weights from pretrained models or focusing on the distribution of attention weights without enforcing structures. Empirical results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms standard ViT initialization across numerous small and medium-scale benchmarks, including Food-101, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, STL-10, Flowers, and Pets, while maintaining comparative performance on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Moreover, our initialization strategy can be easily integrated into various transformer-based architectures such as Swin Transformer and MLP-Mixer with consistent improvements in performance.