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Andrew Saxe

5 accepted papers

2026

A Theory of How Pretraining Shapes Inductive Bias in Fine-Tuning

ICML 2026poster

Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems. In practice, feature learning plays an important role across both stages: deep neural networks learn a broad range of useful features during pretraining and further refine those features during fine-tuning. However, a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Maslow’s Hammer in Catastrophic Forgetting: Node Re-Use vs. Node Activation

ICML 2022spotlight

Continual learning—learning new tasks in sequence while maintaining performance on old tasks—remains particularly challenging for artificial neural networks. Surprisingly, the amount of forgetting does not increase with the dissimilarity between the learned tasks, but appears to be worst in an inter…

2022

The Neural Race Reduction: Dynamics of Abstraction in Gated Networks

ICML 2022spotlight

Our theoretical understanding of deep learning has not kept pace with its empirical success. While network architecture is known to be critical, we do not yet understand its effect on learned representations and network behavior, or how this architecture should reflect task structure.In this work, w…

2021

Continual Learning in the Teacher-Student Setup: Impact of Task Similarity

ICML 2021spotlight

Continual learning{—}the ability to learn many tasks in sequence{—}is critical for artificial learning systems. Yet standard training methods for deep networks often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where learning new tasks erases knowledge of the earlier tasks. While catastrophic forgetting lab…

2020

Characterizing emergent representations in a space of candidate learning rules for deep networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

How are sensory representations learned via experience? Deep learning offers a theoretical toolkit for studying how neural codes emerge under different learning rules. Studies suggesting that representations in deep networks resemble those in biological brains have mostly relied on one specific lear…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar