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Main Authors: Ou, Chengguang, Zhuang, Yixin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15169
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author Ou, Chengguang
Zhuang, Yixin
author_facet Ou, Chengguang
Zhuang, Yixin
contents Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) often converge slowly and struggle to recover high-frequency details due to spectral bias. While prior work links this behavior to the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), how specific architectural choices affect NTK conditioning remains unclear. We show that many INR mechanisms can be understood through their impact on a small set of pairwise similarity factors and scaling terms that jointly determine NTK eigenvalue variance. For standard coordinate MLPs, limited input-feature interactions induce large eigenvalue dispersion and poor conditioning. We derive closed-form variance decompositions for common INR components and show that positional encoding reshapes input similarity, spherical normalization reduces variance via layerwise scaling, and Hadamard modulation introduces additional similarity factors strictly below one, yielding multiplicative variance reduction. This unified view explains how diverse INR architectures mitigate spectral bias by improving NTK conditioning. Experiments across multiple tasks confirm the predicted variance reductions and demonstrate faster, more stable convergence with improved reconstruction quality.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_15169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understanding NTK Variance in Implicit Neural Representations
Ou, Chengguang
Zhuang, Yixin
Machine Learning
Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) often converge slowly and struggle to recover high-frequency details due to spectral bias. While prior work links this behavior to the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), how specific architectural choices affect NTK conditioning remains unclear. We show that many INR mechanisms can be understood through their impact on a small set of pairwise similarity factors and scaling terms that jointly determine NTK eigenvalue variance. For standard coordinate MLPs, limited input-feature interactions induce large eigenvalue dispersion and poor conditioning. We derive closed-form variance decompositions for common INR components and show that positional encoding reshapes input similarity, spherical normalization reduces variance via layerwise scaling, and Hadamard modulation introduces additional similarity factors strictly below one, yielding multiplicative variance reduction. This unified view explains how diverse INR architectures mitigate spectral bias by improving NTK conditioning. Experiments across multiple tasks confirm the predicted variance reductions and demonstrate faster, more stable convergence with improved reconstruction quality.
title Understanding NTK Variance in Implicit Neural Representations
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.15169