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Francesca Mignacco

5 accepted papers

2025

Optimal Protocols for Continual Learning via Statistical Physics and Control Theory

ICLR 2025poster

Artificial neural networks often struggle with _catastrophic forgetting_ when learning multiple tasks sequentially, as training on new tasks degrades the performance on previously learned tasks. Recent theoretical work has addressed this issue by analysing learning curves in synthetic frameworks und…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Dissecting the Interplay of Attention Paths in a Statistical Mechanics Theory of Transformers

NeurIPS 2024poster

Despite the remarkable empirical performance of Transformers, their theoretical understanding remains elusive. Here, we consider a deep multi-head self-attention network, that is closely related to Transformers yet analytically tractable. We develop a statistical mechanics theory of Bayesian learnin…

2024

Forward Learning with Top-Down Feedback: Empirical and Analytical Characterization

ICLR 2024poster

"Forward-only" algorithms, which train neural networks while avoiding a backward pass, have recently gained attention as a way of solving the biologically unrealistic aspects of backpropagation. Here, we first address compelling challenges related to the "forward-only" rules, which include reducing…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2020

Dynamical mean-field theory for stochastic gradient descent in Gaussian mixture classification

NeurIPS 2020poster

We analyze in a closed form the learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a single layer neural network classifying a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture where each cluster is assigned one of two labels. This problem provides a prototype of a non-convex loss landscape with interpolati…

Cited by 107SourcePDFScholar
2020

The Role of Regularization in Classification of High-dimensional Noisy Gaussian Mixture

ICML 2020poster

We consider a high-dimensional mixture of two Gaussians in the noisy regime where even an oracle knowing the centers of the clusters misclassifies a small but finite fraction of the points. We provide a rigorous analysis of the generalization error of regularized convex classifiers, including ridge,…

Cited by 111SourcePDFScholar