Gradient Descent as a Shrinkage Operator for Spectral Bias

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Lucey, Simon
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lucey, Simon
author_facet Lucey, Simon
contents We generalize the connection between activation function and spline regression/smoothing and characterize how this choice may influence spectral bias within a 1D shallow network. We then demonstrate how gradient descent (GD) can be reinterpreted as a shrinkage operator that masks the singular values of a neural network's Jacobian. Viewed this way, GD implicitly selects the number of frequency components to retain, thereby controlling the spectral bias. An explicit relationship is proposed between the choice of GD hyperparameters (learning rate & number of iterations) and bandwidth (the number of active components). GD regularization is shown to be effective only with monotonic activation functions. Finally, we highlight the utility of non-monotonic activation functions (sinc, Gaussian) as iteration-efficient surrogates for spectral bias.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_18207
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gradient Descent as a Shrinkage Operator for Spectral Bias
Lucey, Simon
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We generalize the connection between activation function and spline regression/smoothing and characterize how this choice may influence spectral bias within a 1D shallow network. We then demonstrate how gradient descent (GD) can be reinterpreted as a shrinkage operator that masks the singular values of a neural network's Jacobian. Viewed this way, GD implicitly selects the number of frequency components to retain, thereby controlling the spectral bias. An explicit relationship is proposed between the choice of GD hyperparameters (learning rate & number of iterations) and bandwidth (the number of active components). GD regularization is shown to be effective only with monotonic activation functions. Finally, we highlight the utility of non-monotonic activation functions (sinc, Gaussian) as iteration-efficient surrogates for spectral bias.
title Gradient Descent as a Shrinkage Operator for Spectral Bias
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18207