Eigen Neural Network: Unlocking Generalizable Vision with Eigenbasis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Cheng, Anzhe, Yin, Chenzhong, Cheng, Mingxi, Duan, Shukai, Nazarian, Shahin, Bogdan, Paul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Cheng, Anzhe
Yin, Chenzhong
Cheng, Mingxi
Duan, Shukai
Nazarian, Shahin
Bogdan, Paul
author_facet Cheng, Anzhe
Yin, Chenzhong
Cheng, Mingxi
Duan, Shukai
Nazarian, Shahin
Bogdan, Paul
contents The remarkable success of Deep Neural Networks(DNN) is driven by gradient-based optimization, yet this process is often undermined by its tendency to produce disordered weight structures, which harms feature clarity and degrades learning dynamics. To address this fundamental representational flaw, we introduced the Eigen Neural Network (ENN), a novel architecture that reparameterizes each layer's weights in a layer-shared, learned orthonormal eigenbasis. This design enforces decorrelated, well-aligned weight dynamics axiomatically, rather than through regularization, leading to more structured and discriminative feature representations. When integrated with standard BP, ENN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale image classification benchmarks, including ImageNet, and its superior representations generalize to set a new benchmark in cross-modal image-text retrieval. Furthermore, ENN's principled structure enables a highly efficient, backpropagation-free(BP-free) local learning variant, ENN-$\ell$. This variant not only resolves BP's procedural bottlenecks to achieve over 2$\times$ training speedup via parallelism, but also, remarkably, surpasses the accuracy of end-to-end backpropagation. ENN thus presents a new architectural paradigm that directly remedies the representational deficiencies of BP, leading to enhanced performance and enabling a more efficient, parallelizable training regime.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01219
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Eigen Neural Network: Unlocking Generalizable Vision with Eigenbasis
Cheng, Anzhe
Yin, Chenzhong
Cheng, Mingxi
Duan, Shukai
Nazarian, Shahin
Bogdan, Paul
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
The remarkable success of Deep Neural Networks(DNN) is driven by gradient-based optimization, yet this process is often undermined by its tendency to produce disordered weight structures, which harms feature clarity and degrades learning dynamics. To address this fundamental representational flaw, we introduced the Eigen Neural Network (ENN), a novel architecture that reparameterizes each layer's weights in a layer-shared, learned orthonormal eigenbasis. This design enforces decorrelated, well-aligned weight dynamics axiomatically, rather than through regularization, leading to more structured and discriminative feature representations. When integrated with standard BP, ENN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on large-scale image classification benchmarks, including ImageNet, and its superior representations generalize to set a new benchmark in cross-modal image-text retrieval. Furthermore, ENN's principled structure enables a highly efficient, backpropagation-free(BP-free) local learning variant, ENN-$\ell$. This variant not only resolves BP's procedural bottlenecks to achieve over 2$\times$ training speedup via parallelism, but also, remarkably, surpasses the accuracy of end-to-end backpropagation. ENN thus presents a new architectural paradigm that directly remedies the representational deficiencies of BP, leading to enhanced performance and enabling a more efficient, parallelizable training regime.
title Eigen Neural Network: Unlocking Generalizable Vision with Eigenbasis
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01219