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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Afanah, Assem, Rosenow, Bernd
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16556
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Table of Contents:
  • We study the learning dynamics of the soft committee machine (SCM) with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation using a statistical-mechanics approach within the annealed approximation. The SCM consists of a student network with $N$ input units and $K$ hidden units trained to reproduce the output of a teacher network with $M$ hidden units. We introduce a reduced set of macroscopic order parameters that yields a unified description valid from the conventional regime $K \ll N$ to the ultra-wide limit $K \ge N$. The control parameter $α$, proportional to the ratio of training samples to adjustable weights, serves as an effective measure of dataset size. For small $γ= M/N$, we recover a continuous phase transition at $α_{c} \approx 2π$ from an unspecialized, permutation-symmetric state to a specialized state in which student units align with the teacher. For finite $γ$, the transition disappears and the generalization error decreases smoothly with dataset size, reaching a low plateau when $γ=1$. In the asymptotic limit $α\to \infty$, the error scales as $\varepsilon_{g} \propto 1/α$, independent of $γ$ and $K$. The results highlight the central role of network dimensions in SCM learning and provide a framework extendable to other activations and quenched analyses.