Why Shallow Neural Networks Learn Sinusoidal Components First: An Orthogonal Polynomial Dynamics Framework

Neural networks trained with gradient-based methods exhibit a strong simplicity bias: they learn simpler statistical features of their data before moving to more complex features. Previous analyses of this phenomenon have largely focused on settings with (quasi-)isotropic inputs. In this work, we study the simplicity bias from a Fourier perspective, which allows us to include two key features of natural images in the analysis: approximate translation-invariance and power-law spectra. We first show experimentally that simple neural networks trained on image classification tasks first rely on amplitude information -- related to pair-wise correlations between pixels -- before exploiting phase information, which encodes edges and higher-order correlations. In view of this, we introduce a synthetic data model for translation-invariant inputs that allows precise control over amplitudes and phases while remaining tractable. We rigorously establish that for isotropic and high-dimensional inputs, classification based on phase information alone is a genuinely hard task: online stochastic gradient descent (SGD) cannot distinguish the structured inputs from noise within $n \ll N^3$ steps, but needs at least $n \gg N^3 \log^2{N}$ steps. In contrast, we show both experimentally and theoretically that power-law spectra can dramatically accelerate the speed of learning phase information, even if the spectra do not help with classification. Simulations with two-layer networks trained on textures and with deep convolutional networks on ImageNet and CIFAR100 confirm this non-trivial interaction between amplitudes and phases, providing mechanistic insights into how deep neural networks can learn natural image distributions efficiently.

We analyze a simple one-hidden-layer neural network with ReLU activation functions and fixed biases, with one-dimensional input and output. We study both continuous and discrete versions of the model, and we rigorously prove the convergence of the learning process with the $L^2$ squared loss function and the gradient descent procedure. We also prove the spectral bias property for this learning process. Several conclusions of this analysis are discussed; in particular, regarding the structure and properties that activation functions should possess, as well as the relationships between the spectrum of certain operators and the learning process. Based on this, we also propose an alternative activation function, the full-wave rectified exponential function (FReX), and we discuss the convergence of the gradient descent with this alternative activation function.

Along with fruitful applications of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to realistic problems, recently, some empirical studies of DNNs reported a universal phenomenon of Frequency Principle (F-Principle): a DNN tends to learn a target function from low to high frequencies during the training. The F-Principle has been very useful in providing both qualitative and quantitative understandings of DNNs. In this paper, we rigorously investigate the F-Principle for the training dynamics of a general DNN at three stages: initial stage, intermediate stage, and final stage. For each stage, a theorem is provided in terms of proper quantities characterizing the F-Principle. Our results are general in the sense that they work for multilayer networks with general activation functions, population densities of data, and a large class of loss functions. Our work lays a theoretical foundation of the F-Principle for a better understanding of the training process of DNNs.