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Lachlan Ewen MacDonald

6 accepted papers

2025

Convergence Rates for Gradient Descent on the Edge of Stability for Overparametrised Least Squares

NeurIPS 2025poster

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or "stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large step size regime called the "edge of stability", in which the o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Understanding the Learning Dynamics of LoRA: A Gradient Flow Perspective on Low-Rank Adaptation in Matrix Factorization

AISTATS 2025poster

Despite the empirical success of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in fine-tuning pre-trained models, there is little theoretical understanding of how first-order methods with carefully crafted initialization adapt models to new tasks. In this work, we take the first step towards bridging this gap by theor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

How much does Initialization Affect Generalization?

ICML 2023poster

Characterizing the remarkable generalization properties of over-parameterized neural networks remains an open problem. A growing body of recent literature shows that the bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and architecture choice implicitly leads to better generalization. In this paper, we sho…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

On skip connections and normalisation layers in deep optimisation

NeurIPS 2023poster

We introduce a general theoretical framework, designed for the study of gradient optimisation of deep neural networks, that encompasses ubiquitous architecture choices including batch normalisation, weight normalisation and skip connections. Our framework determines the curvature and regularity pro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar