Ming-Xuan Zhang

Rare Gate Disagreements Can Limit Plasticity: When Gradient Flow Mispredicts Finite-Batch SGD

Population gradient flow is a common tool for reasoning about how neural networks adapt, including after pretraining. We show that it can mispredict finite-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) qualitatively, and we trace the discrepancy to a specific mechanism. In a two-unit ReLU regression, a source task drives the...