← Search

Nicolas Zucchet

6 accepted papers

2025

The emergence of sparse attention: impact of data distribution and benefits of repetition

NeurIPS 2025oral

Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how and when these abilities emerge. To ad…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Recurrent neural networks: vanishing and exploding gradients are not the end of the story

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) notoriously struggle to learn long-term memories, primarily due to vanishing and exploding gradients. The recent success of state-space models (SSMs), a subclass of RNNs, to overcome such difficulties challenges our theoretical understanding. In this paper, we delve…

2023

Online learning of long-range dependencies

NeurIPS 2023poster

Online learning holds the promise of enabling efficient long-term credit assignment in recurrent neural networks. However, current algorithms fall short of offline backpropagation by either not being scalable or failing to learn long-range dependencies. Here we present a high-performance online lear…

2022

A contrastive rule for meta-learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

Humans and other animals are capable of improving their learning performance as they solve related tasks from a given problem domain, to the point of being able to learn from extremely limited data. While synaptic plasticity is generically thought to underlie learning in the brain, the precise neura…

2022

The least-control principle for local learning at equilibrium

NeurIPS 2022accept

Equilibrium systems are a powerful way to express neural computations. As special cases, they include models of great current interest in both neuroscience and machine learning, such as deep neural networks, equilibrium recurrent neural networks, deep equilibrium models, or meta-learning. Here, we p…

2021

Learning where to learn: Gradient sparsity in meta and continual learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Finding neural network weights that generalize well from small datasets is difficult. A promising approach is to learn a weight initialization such that a small number of weight changes results in low generalization error. We show that this form of meta-learning can be improved by letting the learni…