← Search

Yotam Alexander

5 accepted papers

2025

Do Neural Networks Need Gradient Descent to Generalize? A Theoretical Study

NeurIPS 2025poster

Conventional wisdom attributes the mysterious generalization abilities of overparameterized neural networks to gradient descent (and its variants). The recent volume hypothesis challenges this view: it posits that these generalization abilities persist even when gradient descent is replaced by Guess…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Revisiting Glorot Initialization for Long-Range Linear Recurrences

NeurIPS 2025poster

Proper initialization is critical for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), particularly in long-range reasoning tasks, where repeated application of the same weight matrix can cause vanishing or exploding signals. A common baseline for linear recurrences is Glorot initialization, designed to ensure sta…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Implicit Bias of Structured State Space Models Can Be Poisoned With Clean Labels

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Neural networks are powered by an implicit bias: a tendency of gradient descent to fit training data in a way that generalizes to unseen data. A recent class of neural network models gaining increasing popularity is structured state space models (SSMs). Prior work argued that the implicit bias of SS…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

Implicit Bias of Policy Gradient in Linear Quadratic Control: Extrapolation to Unseen Initial States

ICML 2024poster

In modern machine learning, models can often fit training data in numerous ways, some of which perform well on unseen (test) data, while others do not. Remarkably, in such cases gradient descent frequently exhibits an implicit bias that leads to excellent performance on unseen data. This implicit bi…

2023

What Makes Data Suitable for a Locally Connected Neural Network? A Necessary and Sufficient Condition Based on Quantum Entanglement.

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

The question of what makes a data distribution suitable for deep learning is a fundamental open problem. Focusing on locally connected neural networks (a prevalent family of architectures that includes convolutional and recurrent neural networks as well as local self-attention models), we address th…