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Zhenyu Zhu

9 accepted papers

2025

How Gradient descent balances features: A dynamical analysis for two-layer neural networks

ICLR 2025poster

This paper investigates the fundamental regression task of learning $k$ neurons (\emph{a.k.a.} teachers) from Gaussian input, using two-layer ReLU neural networks with width $m$ (\emph{a.k.a.} students) and $m, k= \mathcal{O}(1)$, trained via gradient descent under proper initialization and a small…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Training Deep Learning Models with Norm-Constrained LMOs

ICML 2025spotlight

In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps surprisingly, show that they can be applied to unconstrained proble…

2023

Benign Overfitting in Deep Neural Networks under Lazy Training

ICML 2023poster

This paper focuses on over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation functions and proves that when the data distribution is well-separated, DNNs can achieve Bayes-optimal test error for classification while obtaining (nearly) zero-training error under the lazy training regime.…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2023

Initialization Matters: Privacy-Utility Analysis of Overparameterized Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

We analytically investigate how over-parameterization of models in randomized machine learning algorithms impacts the information leakage about their training data. Specifically, we prove a privacy bound for the KL divergence between model distributions on worst-case neighboring datasets, and explor…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

Sample Complexity Bounds for Score-Matching: Causal Discovery and Generative Modeling

NeurIPS 2023poster

This paper provides statistical sample complexity bounds for score-matching and its applications in causal discovery. We demonstrate that accurate estimation of the score function is achievable by training a standard deep ReLU neural network using stochastic gradient descent. We establish bounds on…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Controlling the Complexity and Lipschitz Constant improves Polynomial Nets

ICLR 2022poster

While the class of Polynomial Nets demonstrates comparable performance to neural networks (NN), it currently has neither theoretical generalization characterization nor robustness guarantees. To this end, we derive new complexity bounds for the set of Coupled CP-Decomposition (CCP) and Nested Couple…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Extrapolation and Spectral Bias of Neural Nets with Hadamard Product: a Polynomial Net Study

NeurIPS 2022accept

Neural tangent kernel (NTK) is a powerful tool to analyze training dynamics of neural networks and their generalization bounds. The study on NTK has been devoted to typical neural network architectures, but it is incomplete for neural networks with Hadamard products (NNs-Hp), e.g., StyleGAN and poly…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2022

Generalization Properties of NAS under Activation and Skip Connection Search

NeurIPS 2022accept

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has fostered the automatic discovery of state-of-the-art neural architectures. Despite the progress achieved with NAS, so far there is little attention to theoretical guarantees on NAS. In this work, we study the generalization properties of NAS under a unifying fram…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

Robustness in deep learning: The good (width), the bad (depth), and the ugly (initialization)

NeurIPS 2022accept

We study the average robustness notion in deep neural networks in (selected) wide and narrow, deep and shallow, as well as lazy and non-lazy training settings. We prove that in the under-parameterized setting, width has a negative effect while it improves robustness in the over-parameterized setting…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar