On Interpolation Formulas Describing Neural Network Generalization

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Hauptverfasser: Guo, Jin, He, Roy Y., Morel, Jean-Michel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Guo, Jin
He, Roy Y.
Morel, Jean-Michel
author_facet Guo, Jin
He, Roy Y.
Morel, Jean-Michel
contents In 2020 Domingos introduced an interpolation formula valid for "every model trained by gradient descent". He concluded that such models behave approximately as kernel machines. In this work, we extend the Domingos formula to stochastic training. We introduce a stochastic gradient kernel that extends the deterministic version via a continuous-time diffusion approximation. We prove stochastic Domingos theorems and show that the expected network output admits a kernel-machine representation with optimizer-specific weighting. It reveals that training samples contribute through loss-dependent weights and gradient alignment along the training trajectory. We then link the generalization error to the null space of the integral operator induced by the stochastic gradient kernel. The same path-kernel viewpoint provides a unified interpretation of diffusion models and GANs: diffusion induces stage-wise, noise-localized corrections, whereas GANs induce distribution-guided corrections shaped by discriminator geometry. We visualize the evolution of implicit kernels during optimization and quantify out-of-distribution behaviors through a series of numerical experiments. Our results support a feature-space memory view of learning: training stores data-dependent information in an evolving tangent feature geometry, and predictions at test time arise from kernel-weighted retrieval and aggregation of these stored features, with generalization governed by alignment between test points and the learned feature memory.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13872
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On Interpolation Formulas Describing Neural Network Generalization
Guo, Jin
He, Roy Y.
Morel, Jean-Michel
Machine Learning
Dynamical Systems
In 2020 Domingos introduced an interpolation formula valid for "every model trained by gradient descent". He concluded that such models behave approximately as kernel machines. In this work, we extend the Domingos formula to stochastic training. We introduce a stochastic gradient kernel that extends the deterministic version via a continuous-time diffusion approximation. We prove stochastic Domingos theorems and show that the expected network output admits a kernel-machine representation with optimizer-specific weighting. It reveals that training samples contribute through loss-dependent weights and gradient alignment along the training trajectory. We then link the generalization error to the null space of the integral operator induced by the stochastic gradient kernel. The same path-kernel viewpoint provides a unified interpretation of diffusion models and GANs: diffusion induces stage-wise, noise-localized corrections, whereas GANs induce distribution-guided corrections shaped by discriminator geometry. We visualize the evolution of implicit kernels during optimization and quantify out-of-distribution behaviors through a series of numerical experiments. Our results support a feature-space memory view of learning: training stores data-dependent information in an evolving tangent feature geometry, and predictions at test time arise from kernel-weighted retrieval and aggregation of these stored features, with generalization governed by alignment between test points and the learned feature memory.
title On Interpolation Formulas Describing Neural Network Generalization
topic Machine Learning
Dynamical Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13872