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Alessandro Laio

8 accepted papers

2025

Emergence of a High-Dimensional Abstraction Phase in Language Transformers

ICLR 2025poster

A language model (LM) is a mapping from a linguistic context to an output token. However, much remains to be known about this mapping, including how its geometric properties relate to its function. We take a high-level geometric approach to its analysis, observing, across five pre-trained transforme…

2024

A distributional simplicity bias in the learning dynamics of transformers

NeurIPS 2024poster

The remarkable capability of over-parameterised neural networks to generalise effectively has been explained by invoking a ``simplicity bias'': neural networks prevent overfitting by initially learning simple classifiers before progressing to more complex, non-linear functions. While simplicity bias…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

The geometry of hidden representations of large transformer models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Large transformers are powerful architectures used for self-supervised data analysis across various data types, including protein sequences, images, and text. In these models, the semantic structure of the dataset emerges from a sequence of transformations between one representation and the next. W…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2022

Prune and distill: similar reformatting of image information along rat visual cortex and deep neural networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Visual object recognition has been extensively studied in both neuroscience and computer vision. Recently, the most popular class of artificial systems for this task, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has been shown to provide excellent models for its functional analogue in the brain, the v…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Redundant representations help generalization in wide neural networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deep neural networks (DNNs) defy the classical bias-variance trade-off: adding parameters to a DNN that interpolates its training data will typically improve its generalization performance. Explaining the mechanism behind this ``benign overfitting'' in deep networks remains an outstanding challenge.…

2020

Hierarchical nucleation in deep neural networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

Deep convolutional networks (DCNs) learn meaningful representations where data that share the same abstract characteristics are positioned closer and closer. Understanding these representations and how they are generated is of unquestioned practical and theoretical interest. In this work we study…

2019

Intrinsic dimension of data representations in deep neural networks

NeurIPS 2019poster

Deep neural networks progressively transform their inputs across multiple processing layers. What are the geometrical properties of the representations learned by these networks? Here we study the intrinsic dimensionality (ID) of data representations, i.e. the minimal number of parameters needed to…