In modern deep learning, weight decay is often credited with "stabilizing" training dynamics, diverging from its classical role as a static regularization penalty. We investigate a fundamental question: *does weight decay stabilize training dynamics, and if so, through which mechanism?* Indeed, training stability is understood through different but related notions in the literature. We consider how weight decay affects the parameter-space dynamics and loss sharpness by analyzing its effects at the \emph{Edge of Stability} (EoS). We show that weight decay robustly slows *progressive sharpening}. Furthermore, we uncover a striking architecture-dependent phase transition. In CNNs, weight decay dampens the oscillations at the EoS, while in MLPs, increasing weight decay causes a phase transition in which the sharpness stabilizes at a threshold significantly below the theoretical $\frac{2}η$ boundary. We develop a mathematical framework that accurately models these phenomena and identify the global alignment of the parameter vector and the sharpness gradient as the mechanistic driver of the phase transition. Importantly, we show that these phenomena translate into stability in terms of search in function-space (NTK). Last, this shows that curvature thresholds obtained from convex/quadratic heuristics may not be reliable stability diagnostics under regularization.

Advances in generative models have recently revolutionised machine learning. Meanwhile, in neuroscience, generative models have long been thought fundamental to animal intelligence. Understanding the biological mechanisms that support these processes promises to shed light on the relationship between biological and artificial intelligence. In animals, the hippocampal formation is thought to learn and use a generative model to support its role in spatial and non-spatial memory. Here we introduce a biologically plausible model of the hippocampal formation tantamount to a Helmholtz machine that we apply to a temporal stream of inputs. A novel component of our model is that fast theta-band oscillations (5-10 Hz) gate the direction of information flow throughout the network, training it akin to a high-frequency wake-sleep algorithm. Our model accurately infers the latent state of high-dimensional sensory environments and generates realistic sensory predictions. Furthermore, it can learn to path integrate by developing a ring attractor connectivity structure matching previous theoretical proposals and flexibly transfer this structure between environments.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

We consider the problem of recovering a signal observed in Gaussian noise. If the set of signals is convex and compact, and can be specified beforehand, one can use classical linear estimators that achieve a risk within a constant factor of the minimax risk. However, when the set is unspecified, designing an estimator that is blind to the hidden structure of the signal remains a challenging problem. We propose a new family of estimators to recover signals observed in Gaussian noise. Instead of specifying the set where the signal lives, we assume the existence of a well-performing linear estimator. Proposed estimators enjoy exact oracle inequalities and can be efficiently computed through convex optimization.

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have become the state-of-the-art choice for extracting patterns from temporal sequences. Current RNN models are ill suited to process irregularly sampled data triggered by events generated in continuous time by sensors or other neurons. Such data can occur, for example, when the input comes from novel event-driven artificial sensors which generate sparse, asynchronous streams of events or from multiple conventional sensors with different update intervals. In this work, we introduce the Phased LSTM model, which extends the LSTM unit by adding a new time gate. This gate is controlled by a parametrized oscillation with a frequency range which require updates of the memory cell only during a small percentage of the cycle. Even with the sparse updates imposed by the oscillation, the Phased LSTM network achieves faster convergence than regular LSTMs on tasks which require learning of long sequences. The model naturally integrates inputs from sensors of arbitrary sampling rates, thereby opening new areas of investigation for processing asynchronous sensory events that carry timing information. It also greatly improves the performance of LSTMs in standard RNN applications, and does so with an order-of-magnitude fewer computes.

The dynamical stability of the iterates during training plays a key role in determining the minima obtained by optimization algorithms. For example, stable solutions of gradient descent (GD) correspond to flat minima, which have been associated with favorable features. While prior work often relies on linearization to determine stability, it remains unclear whether linearized dynamics faithfully capture the full nonlinear behavior. Recent work has shown that GD may stably oscillate near a linearly unstable minimum and still converge once the step size decays, indicating that linear analysis can be misleading. In this work, we explicitly study the effect of nonlinear terms. Specifically, we derive an exact criterion for stable oscillations of GD near minima in the multivariate setting. Our condition depends on high-order derivatives, generalizing existing results. Extending the analysis to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), we show that nonlinear dynamics can diverge in expectation even if a single batch is unstable. This implies that stability can be dictated by a single batch that oscillates unstably, rather than an average effect, as linear analysis suggests. Finally, we prove that if all batches are linearly stable, the nonlinear dynamics of SGD are stable in expectation.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

First, each place cell has localized spatial coding which fires inrestricted regions ofa givenenvironment (placefields)[7,8].