Demystifying depth: Principles of learning in deep neural networks

Deep neural networks have revolutionized artificial intelligence, yet their inner workings remain poorly understood. This talk presents mathematical analyses of the nonlinear dynamics of learning in several solvable deep network models, offering theoretical insights into the role of depth. These models reveal how learning algorithms, data structure, initialization schemes, and architectural choices interact to produce hidden representations that afford complex generalization behaviors. A recurring theme across these analyses is a neural race: competing pathways within a deep network vie to explain the data, with an implicit bias toward shared representations. These shared representations in turn shape the network’s capacity for systematic generalization, multitasking, and transfer learning. I will show how such principles manifest across diverse architectures—including feedforward, recurrent, and linear attention networks. Together, these results provide analytic foundations for understanding how environmental statistics, network architecture, and learning dynamics jointly structure the emergence of neural representations and behavior.