Geometric and Spectral Alignment for Deep Neural Network I

This paper develops the angular and static-channel component of Geometric and Spectral Alignment for residual Jacobian chains. Starting from Cartan-coordinate rigidity and fitted effective-rank windows, we study how dominant singular subspaces are transported across adjacent layers and how the resulting finite matrices can be displayed in physical channel coordinates. The main results are deterministic, margin-verified results. We bound the error between full interface transport and its dominant-window truncation, add fitted-tail errors so that empirical spectra can be certified against the Gibbs--Cartan tail model, and distinguish source-mode incidence from fully physical input-output channel incidence. Given row groups and active supports, the Physical Alignment Matrix decomposes orthogonally as core plus overlap plus noise. Active-column gaps, pairwise overlap margins, and noise bounds combine into a static certificate radius under which the full transport and the truncated transport induce the same active supports, pairwise incidence graph, SRS sets, hub columns, and core/overlap/noise masks. The finer SC/SA/ST labels of the Invariant Channel Mapping require additional row-energy and profile-correlation margins, stated as explicit perturbation tests. The empirical section reports the matrices and block-energy heatmaps that measure these certificate quantities across CNNs, language models, and vision/diffusion backbones. The figures are interpreted as finite-dimensional measurements; complete membership in the Physical GSA certificate domain requires checking the numerical margin protocol stated in Section 10.

We study the large-depth behavior of residual networks whose weights are correlated across layers at initialization. Our results confirm and extend a conjecture of Marion et al. [2025], according to which correlated initializations should interpolate continuously between the Brownian stochastic differential equation arising from independent initialization and the ordinary differential equation arising from perfectly correlated initialization. When the initialization is obtained from the application of a feature function to a stationary Gaussian sequence with regularly varying correlation, we prove that there exists a unique critical scaling such that the infinite-depth limit is the solution of a Young differential equation driven by a Hermite process. Hermite processes reduce to the fractional Brownian motion if the feature function generating the initialization has Hermite rank one, which is the case for the identity function, for example. We show that the critical scaling and asymptotic limit are uniquely determined by the decay of correlations together with the Hermite rank of the feature function. Consequently, the correlation structure and Hermite rank of the initialization represent meaningful hyperparameters in the asymptotic regime. By contrast, under finite-variance iid initialization, the asymptotic driver is universally Brownian up to normalization regardless of the choice of distribution. Our proofs rely on a collection of novel results establishing a robust stability theory for Young differential equations in Banach spaces.

We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization. We reinterpret skip connections and normalization, long understood as controlling magnitude, as mechanisms for preserving gradient rank across depth, since the very matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations that make the network expressive also reduce the rank. We show that skip connections trade off rank collapse against ensemble-like behavior, controlled by the relative scales of the branch and the skip: skip connections route the gradient around the residual branch, where rank is lost, rather than along the long gradient paths that encourage the layers to compose. The placement of the normalization layer controls this same tradeoff by setting the branch-to-skip ratio across depth, unifying much of the normalization placement and depth scaling literature, in particular why rank collapses for Post-Norm but plateaus for Pre-Norm. Other aspects of the architecture, like the two-matrix structure that expands and contracts the width, use additional parameters to preserve the representation or branch Jacobian rank. The second matrix decorrelates a coherent mean spike that would grow across blocks with a single matrix and uncentered activation, preventing the residual representation from collapsing. The width expansion between the two matrices keeps the branch Jacobian full rank: applying the rank-reducing activation in this expanded space leaves enough directions to span the original, at a width that follows a Marchenko--Pastur law. The initialization rank of the input--output Jacobian predicts which networks train on CIFAR-10. Taken together, we recast architecture design for deep networks as navigating an intrinsic tradeoff among rank collapse, ensemble-like behavior, and parameter count.