Neural Scaling Laws

Momentum

9 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 13Week of Sep 28

Latest papers 53

Oct 5, 2026stat.ML

A Solvable Model of Adaptive Learning Rate Rescaling: Acceleration, Stability & Scaling

A recurring design principle in modern optimizers is to decouple update magnitude from the raw gradient norm, yet its consequences for learning-curve and resource scaling remain unclear. We isolate this mechanism by studying normalized SGD in a random-feature model with power-law teacher and data covariance. Fixed-norm updates induce an effective learning rate that grows as gradients shrink. We derive a dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT) describing the joint dependence of the loss on training time, model width and batch size. Normalization initially accelerates SGD, mapping the power-law exponent rSGD<1r_{\rm SGD}<1 to 2rSGD/(1−rSGD)2r_{\rm SGD}/(1-r_{\rm SGD}), with exponential convergence at rSGD=1r_{\rm SGD}=1 and formal finite-time convergence for rSGD>1r_{\rm SGD}>1. At finite step size, however, the same feedback ultimately breaks the acceleration and leads to marginal stability. The late-time theory yields width-limited, edge-of-stochastic-stability (EoSS), and deterministic edge-of-stability (EoS) regimes. These phases determine when larger batches or wider models reduce serial training time at comparable compute. We quantify in which of these phases increased batch size or width can compensate the excess compute use per step by fewer optimization steps to target loss. Linearized ResNet experiments on CIFAR-5M support the predicted acceleration, breakdown, and resource-scaling trends. Together, these results connect normalization-induced acceleration, EoS effects, and width--batch allocation within a solvable theory.
Oct 4, 2026cs.LG

A Unified Scaling Law for Time Series Foundation Models

We develop a Unified Scaling Law and a Unified Theory of Time Series Learning to understand how model capacity and historical information support forecasting. Across different lookback lengths and forecast horizons, we analyze 18,768 experimental cells from 21 checkpoints on 23 dataset-frequency tasks spanning six domains. Our empirical methodology integrates local resource relations into a parsimonious, fitted five-parameter law: capacity gains increase with history, context gains diminish toward saturation, and horizon effects enter as a common shift. Fitted without Toto 2.0, the law predicts its horizon-averaged capacity-scaling curves with mean absolute percentage errors of 1.09% and 1.50% at input lengths 2048 and 4096. To understand how history supports prediction, our learning theory uses Gaussian regression to analyze rule identification and predictive capability. We hypothesize that full-shot models learn by accumulating information in weights, while frozen time series foundation models (TSFMs) use history by extracting information through activations. Matched-history comparisons establish the predictive value of additional history. Controlled parameter exchanges and activation interventions provide evidence that history-derived rule information can be retained, reused across queries, and used to recover a contribution to long-context prediction. Together, these findings inform capacity scaling, context allocation, and the development of models that retain and apply historical rules. Code and main results are available at https://github.com/Fifthky/UniScale.
Oct 1, 2026cs.CV

Overcoming Kernel Redundancy for Scaling Logic Gate Networks

Differentiable logic gate networks, which operate using only logic gates, have recently attracted attention as an efficient alternative to conventional neural networks. However, despite their efficiency, the scaling behavior of logic gate networks remains underexplored. By contrast, scaling model capacity is a central design principle in deep neural networks and typically leads to improved performance. This discrepancy raises a key question: Can similar scaling benefits also be achieved in logic gate networks? In this work, we focus on width as a primary scaling axis and conduct a systematic analysis of its behavior in logic gate networks. We observe that naive width scaling often introduces redundancy among logic kernels, limiting the effective use of additional kernels and leading to performance saturation. To address this limitation, we propose a dynamic logic kernel framework that reorganizes kernel utilization by promoting specialization across kernel groups. This enables the network to better utilize increased width via input-dependent kernel routing, while ensuring that both routing and computation are implemented entirely with gate-level Boolean operations at inference time. We further find that kernel redundancy is most pronounced at the first gate level, motivating an early-stage dynamic logic kernel strategy that concentrates adaptation at this level. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach improves kernel utilization and increases kernel diversity, leading to higher accuracy with improved parameter efficiency.
Oct 1, 2026cs.LG

Neural scaling laws and evolution of learnable activation functions of Kolmogorov-Arnold networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) represent a compelling alternative to traditional Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-based neural networks. By employing activation functions as learnable elements, KANs offer superior interpretability, making them suited for scientific domains. In this work, we investigate the neural scaling laws of KANs and the structural evolution of their learnable activation functions under dataset expansion. Specifically, we evaluate the scaling behavior of three KAN variants---BSRBF-KAN, Gottlieb-KAN, and Faster-KAN---across standard image classification benchmarks (MNIST and Fashion-MNIST) and a specialized scientific regression task (magnetic parameter estimation from domain images of moiré magnetic textures). Our results demonstrate that the test loss L{\cal L} exhibits a broken neural scaling law (BNSL) behavior as a function of the dataset size NDN_D. After passing through a random-guess regime, the loss follows architecture- and task-dependent scaling behavior. The loss crosses from a faster- to a slower-scaling branch, L∝ND−α{\cal L}\propto N_D^{-α} and L∝ND−β{\cal L}\propto N_D^{-β} with α>βα>β for image classification tasks. The exponents αα and ββ depend strongly on both the specific network architecture and the dataset-size regime, ranging from 0.4 to 1.5 and from 0.06 to 0.6, respectively. For the magnetic parameter-regression task, the loss follows a single scaling law with its exponent ranging from 1.28 to 2.59. Additionally, we provide a structural analysis of how activation functions refine their complexity as data volume increases, finding that dataset expansion drives a transition from simple linear-like approximations toward stable, interpretable symbolic forms. These findings provide a quantitative roadmap for the efficient application of KANs while managing the trade-off between model expressivity and computational overhead.
Sep 30, 2026cs.AI

Effective Does Not Mean Useful: Conditional Functional Substitutability for Redundancy and Scaling in Transformers

Modern neural networks scale predictably, yet the mechanisms behind these regularities remain unclear. Neural redundancy is typically characterized by component importance or representational similarity, both indirect proxies. We view redundancy as an input-conditioned, dynamic relation: intermediate computational states are functionally redundant when they induce similar downstream responses. We introduce Conditional Functional Substitutability (CFS) to directly characterize such functional substitution. CFS exposes functional relations and reduction potential missed by conventional importance- and similarity-based measures. Across modalities and Transformer families, CFS reveals systematic functional reorganization with scale. Controlled scaling further shows that performance gains need not track growth in substitutability, while fixed-capacity models with more independent functional structure perform better, providing a functional account of diminishing returns. Predicted CFS further enables dynamic computation with a better performance--computation trade-off than importance-based component selection, suggesting new directions for redundancy-aware computation and more efficient model scaling.
Sep 27, 2026stat.ML

Neural Scaling Laws of Transformer Operator Network

Transformers have emerged as powerful architectures for learning solution operators of physical systems. Empirically the prediction error has been observed to decrease when the data size and model size increase, suggesting neural scaling behavior. Yet a theoretical understanding of such scaling laws for transformer-based operator learning remains limited. In this work, we develop a theoretical framework for characterizing the approximation and generalization errors of transformer-based operator learning. Our analysis builds on a local-to-global approximation principle that is naturally aligned with the softmax attention mechanism and yields discretization-invariant output functions. On approximation theory, we derive a universal approximation error of transformer-based operator learning for Hölder-regular operators. On generalization theory, we establish a power scaling law between the prediction error and the training data size. The rate of convergence represented by the scaling exponent explicitly reflects the dimensions of the input and output domains, the regularity of the underlying functions and operators, and crucially, the intrinsic dimension of the input function class. By exploiting this intrinsic low-dimensional structure, our analysis yields a power-law generalization rate for operator learning, in contrast to the logarithmic-type power-law rates appearing in existing analyses of operator learning with feedforward neural networks. Numerical experiments validate the predicted power-law scaling and confirm that the convergence rate varies systematically with the intrinsic dimension of the input function class.
Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

The Capability Manifold and ML Scaling Laws

Existing machine learning (ML) scaling laws relate predictive loss to compute, model parameters, and data. However, as models are increasingly deployed through agentic harnesses, loss alone is insufficient to characterize downstream performance: models with similar loss can exhibit different capabilities in reasoning, retrieval, planning, and adaptation. Yet, no unified framework connects such capabilities to the coupled resources available across the ML lifecycle. We bridge this gap by introducing a capability manifold, a multidimensional framework mapping downstream capabilities to pre-training, post-training, and test-time resources through bounded scaling functions. Analytical Jacobians quantify capability sensitivity to resource changes and interactions. As an initial application, we embed Kaplan- and Chinchilla-type scaling laws and test-time compute within the framework, demonstrating how existing scaling relationships can be unified as trajectories on a common capability manifold.
Sep 23, 2026cs.LG

A Scaling Study for fMRI Foundation Models

Scaling laws have guided large-model development in computer vision and natural language processing, but the relationships among data, model size, and compute remain unclear for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) foundation models. Here, we conduct a controlled empirical study using pretraining data from more than 200 source datasets and over 10,000 GPU-hours of experiments. Holding the pretraining framework and downstream protocol fixed, we vary pretraining data size, model size, and training duration. Downstream performance generally improves with compute, yet models using similar compute can perform substantially differently. Additional pretraining data bring larger gains at larger model sizes, suggesting that data and model size should be scaled together. At matched compute, increasing pretraining data benefits more tasks than increasing model size, although the pattern varies across tasks. We then use in-distribution (ID) downstream performance to select the combination of pretraining data size, model size, and training duration at two fixed compute budgets. The resulting models are locked before out-of-distribution (OOD) evaluation. They achieve the highest average performance across the evaluated OOD tasks among the compared fMRI foundation models while using less pretraining compute. Overall, our results show that compute alone does not characterize fMRI scaling: performance depends on how pretraining data, model size, and training duration are combined.
Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

Symmetry without a manifold: intrinsic dimension on orbits

The standard geometric derivation of neural scaling exponents takes the intrinsic dimension of a data manifold as its input. On modular addition in Zp\mathbb{Z}_p that derivation has no input. The exact algebraic solution is an orbit of Zp\mathbb{Z}_p acting by isometries. Transitivity alone makes the ratio statistic underlying the standard dimension estimator a point mass, so the estimator is undefined, and here the two nearest neighbour distances coincide exactly. Breaking the symmetry at scale εε returns a number, but one that tracks 1/ε1/ε with no scale free plateau. We show that the failure is general, since on any finite orbit of a group acting by isometries the estimator reports the resolution at which the set is probed rather than a dimension. What replaces the power law is exponential in hidden width, L(h)=L∞+Aexp⁡(−c hα)L(h)=L_\infty+A\exp(-c\,h^α), with R2R^2 between 0.982 and 0.995 against 0.857 to 0.906 for a power law admitting the same floor and fitted under the same protocol. Where the data supply is sufficient the rate belongs to the regulariser rather than to the group, since weight decay moves cc by a factor of 47 while group order moves it by 1.10, a residual below seed to seed resolution, for every fixed αα between 0.75 and 2. The critical width falls with group order rather than rising, against capacity counting that assigns a fixed number of neurons to each irreducible representation.
Sep 12, 2026cs.AI

Quantifying the Memorization-to-Generalization Transition: Scaling Laws and Phase Structure in Grokking

Neural networks trained past memorization frequently undergo a delayed transition to generalization, a phenomenon known as grokking. Despite theoretical progress on \emph{why} this transition occurs, the quantitative structure of \emph{when} it occurs in hyperparameter space remains uncharacterized. We map the memorization-to-generalization boundary across 384 configurations of two-hidden-layer MLPs on modular arithmetic, fitting a power-law scaling relation for generalization onset time: Tgrok∝H−0.27 D−2.04 η−0.50 λ−0.64T_{\mathrm{grok}} \propto H^{-0.27}\, D^{-2.04}\, \eta^{-0.50}\, \lambda^{-0.64} (R2=0.732R^2 = 0.732; 0.8210.821 with interactions). The exponent hierarchy reveals that data complexity (D−2.04D^{-2.04}) is the dominant driver of regime transition, not model capacity (H−0.27H^{-0.27}): doubling data accelerates generalization by ∼4×{\sim}4\times, while doubling width yields only ∼1.2×{\sim}1.2\times. A sharp phase boundary at weight decay λ≳1.0\lambda \gtrsim 1.0 separates grokking from non-grokking configurations, and weight norm trajectories show monotonic compression during the transition, consistent with implicit regularization selecting low-complexity solutions. These results provide a quantitative foundation for predicting and controlling regime transitions in overparameterized networks.
Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

Coupled Scaling: A Representational Accessibility Framework for Neural Scaling Laws

Existing theories derive neural scaling from data geometry or a specified data-model spectrum, but systems trained on the same data can scale differently when architecture or optimization changes the representations they can efficiently reach. We introduce Coupled Scaling, a task-conditioned framework in which finite-budget scaling depends on the relation between task structure and the geometry accessible to an architecture-optimization system. In a solvable mode-truncation model, loss separates into target energy outside architectural support and an unresolved supported tail. For an arbitrary priority order, the residual lies between the best-N supported tail and the tail beyond the largest completed high-value prefix. If the cumulative-tail and coverage log-rates are γA,Tγ_{A,T} and ρA,O,Tρ_{A,O,T}, the residual exponent lies in [ρA,O,TγA,T,γA,T][ρ_{A,O,T}γ_{A,T},γ_{A,T}]. Under bounded off-prefix gain, the completed prefix is rate-determining and αA,O,T=ρA,O,TγA,Tα_{A,O,T}=ρ_{A,O,T}γ_{A,T}; for aA,T,j≍j−bA,Ta_{A,T,j}\asymp j^{-b_{A,T}}, this gives αA,O,T=ρA,O,T(bA,T−1)α_{A,O,T}=ρ_{A,O,T}(b_{A,T}-1). A fixed-kernel specialization derives the training-time exponent from the near-zero tail of a task-weighted spectral measure defined independently of the loss fit. The framework separates architectural support from finite-budget acquisition and motivates two tests: static task-relevant geometry should track loss at a common budget, while multiscale geometry should track coupling-specific exponent ordering, including reversal across contrasting tasks. An audit of released emergence trajectories identifies the controls needed for a direct factorial test that measures geometry separately from the scaling fit.
Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Neural Quadratic Forms: A Unified Minimal Model for Sudden Learning and Scaling Laws

Neural networks trained by gradient descent on a smooth cost function can nevertheless learn in steps: the cost holds on long plateaus and then drops abruptly. Meanwhile, training losses instead follow smooth power laws. Variants of both behaviors occur in architectures with very different microscopic structures, which is the signature of a few relevant collective variables. We show that a symmetry fixes what those variables are: a network layer is a sum over interchangeable units, so relabeling the units leaves it unchanged; given smoothness and the condition that a unit's gradient vanish at the origin, symmetry then enforces a universal leading form for the expansion about the near-zero weights present at the start of training, the quadratic \Tr[WW⊤A(x)]\Tr[WW^{\top}A(x)], in which every architectural detail is confined to a single structure matrix" $A(x)$ that we compute for each architecture. Perceptrons, attention layers, mixtures of experts, and convolutions become one model at different $A$. Its training dynamics then close on the order parameter" M=WW⊤M=WW^{\top} and, whenever the data matrices share an eigenbasis, reduce to a Lotka--Volterra equation whose modes switch on one after another. The smaller the initial weights, the further apart the switch-on times, and the plateaus appear as a singular limit of a smooth flow; when many modes are unresolved the same events merge into a power law in training time whose exponent the theory predicts. We confirm both numerically across training methods and architectures.
Aug 7, 2026cs.CL

Skaling: Chinchilla's Exponents Meet Kaplan's Coupling

Neural scaling laws are foundational for language model development, yet standard formulations systematically under- and overestimate loss at data-scarce and overtraining extremes. This failure originates in the underlying assumption that model size and training data impact the loss independently. To address this, we introduce the Skaling law, a generalized functional form that couples model capacity and data through a single interaction exponent. This simple extension reduces the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) by 1.5-3x across both interpolation and extrapolation regimes. When paired with a sparse grid strategy restricted to low-compute regimes, the Skaling law achieves accurate full-grid extrapolation using approximately 10x less compute than uniform sweeps. By enabling reliable performance prediction from small-scale experiments, the Skaling law provides a more robust and resource-efficient framework for allocating compute budgets in next-generation model training.
Jul 27, 2026cs.LG

Mechanisms of Width Scaling in Normalized Residual Networks: The Effective Alignment Dimension

Existing theories of neural-network width characterize asymptotic limits, but provide limited guidance on whether an expansion direction identified from finite training data remains beneficial on unseen data. We study this problem for function-preserving residual expansion and introduce the effective alignment dimension, a measurable quantity describing the signal-noise geometry of activation gradients. By deriving the exact mean and variance of the inner product between independently estimated training and test gradients, we obtain a finite-sample upper bound on misalignment probability. The bound depends only on the effective alignment dimension and an effective sample size, requiring finite second moments and a nonzero population gradient, without covariance spectral assumptions or prescribed width-growth rates. We integrate this certificate into the train-test residual-expansion framework, yielding a high-probability condition for test-risk improvement. Experiments across width-controlled LLaMA-style Transformers, Pythia, and ResNet-20 show that wider models exhibit larger effective alignment dimensions and lower empirical misalignment. Direct residual interventions confirm that the alignment statistic predicts the sign and magnitude of held-out loss changes.
Jul 6, 2026cs.CL

EdgeBench: Unveiling Scaling Laws of Learning from Real-World Environments

Pretraining scaling laws reveal that model capability improves predictably with data and compute. But learning from real world environments after deployment remains far less understood. Analyzing roughly 38,000 hours of agent interaction with the environment across 134 real world tasks, we find, to the best of our knowledge, the first evidence that overall performance during environment learning follows a log-sigmoid scaling law with remarkably high precision, reaching R^2 = 0.998. Across model generations, we also find that agent learning speed roughly doubles every three months. This discovery stems from EdgeBench, a suite of 134 real world tasks with ultra-long horizons, spanning scientific discovery, software engineering, combinatorial optimization, professional knowledge work, formal mathematics, and interactive games. Each task sustains at least 12 hours of continuous agent operation under rich, multilevel feedback, and is built through substantial expert effort. We publicly release 51 tasks and our full evaluation framework to accelerate the study of how agents learn from real world experience.
Jul 6, 2026cs.LG

Hyperparameter Transfer in Graph Neural Networks

The performance of deep learning models crucially depends on the settings of hyperparameters like learning rate, initialization scale, and weight decay. Hyperparameter transfer aims to make near-optimal hyperparameter settings consistent across model scale, so that large models can be optimized by proxy tuning their smaller, cheaper-to-optimize counterparts. While transfer principles are well-studied in the context of dense neural networks in language and vision tasks, they remain comparatively under-explored for graph neural networks (GNNs). We develop and validate a transfer parameterization for GNNs trained with SGD, Adam, and AdamW. Through theoretical scaling analyses and controlled experiments, we show that the proposed parameterization yields stable feature updates, learning rate transfer, and improved performance as width and depth increase. For SGD, we identify graph-dependent first-layer correction factors and show that their use can accelerate early training in graphs with sparse bag-of-words inputs. For Adam, we explore how different message passing normalizations affect early- and late-training transfer behavior, illustrating the importance of message passing normalization and advocating for an associated hyperparameter. For AdamW, we adapt a parameterization that allows for the joint transfer of weight decay and learning rate. Together, these results provide a practical recipe for scaling GNNs across a variety of learning tasks and training scenarios.
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

How to Allocate Your Tokens? Scaling Laws with Training Steps and Batch Size

We propose a scaling law that takes into account model size and training data while explicitly splitting the latter into training steps and batch size (called three-term law). Fitting the proposed law on a large set of training runs, we find that it correctly recovers the scaling of the optimal batch size. Moreover, because it makes use of training runs with suboptimal batch size, our proposed law can be robustly fit with a significantly smaller amount of training runs. We further show that the three-term law can be used to derive scaling laws for suboptimal batch sizes, and that it matches previous empirical findings related to the critical batch size.
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

From Approximation to Emergence: A Theory of Deep Learning

Deep learning has outgrown any single mathematical explanation. From Approximation to Emergence develops a unified, proof-oriented account of modern deep learning theory, tracing a path from the classical foundations of approximation, optimization, and generalization to the contemporary mechanisms of overparameterization, robustness, generative modeling, transformers, in-context learning, scaling laws, interpretability, alignment, and emergence. Rather than presenting isolated results, the book organizes a broad literature into a coherent research narrative: each theory is examined through the object it controls, the assumptions that make it valid, and the phenomena it leaves unexplained. Written for researchers, graduate students, and mathematically trained practitioners, this monograph offers a rigorous map of deep learning theory as it stands today: powerful, incomplete, and increasingly centered on the question of how learned mechanisms arise from scale, data, architecture, and training.
Jun 29, 2026stat.ML

A Stochastic--Geometric Theory of Scaling Laws in Grokking

Delayed generalization (\ie~grokking) refers to the phenomenon in which a neural network fits its training data early in training but only begins to generalize after a prolonged delay, often through an abrupt transition. Despite extensive empirical study, its underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. In this work, we first theoretically characterize a shell--core topological configuration of the reachable solution space induced by Adam's optimization dynamics with weight-shrinkage regularization, supported by empirical evidence. This optimization-induced topological configuration gives rise to grokking. In model's parameter space, random initialization solutions concentrate on a thin outer spherical shell, enclosing another spherical shell of memorization solutions, which in turn contains a core corresponding to the generalization solutions. Leveraging stopping-time theory, we then analyze the geometry of this topological configuration and the solution transition time at which optimization trajectories escape the memorization manifold and first reach the boundary of the generalization manifold. Our theoretical analysis derives grokking scaling laws for the learning rate, batch size, and ℓ2\ell_2 regularization coefficient, which are further validated through experiments and shown to recover results from prior literature.
Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

How Width and Data Shape Generalization Scaling Laws in Quadratic Neural Networks

Understanding how performance scales jointly with model size and data is a central problem in modern machine learning. Existing theoretical works on scaling laws typically describe generalization as a function of data or compute, often in fixed-feature or infinite-width regimes and for online SGD. Here, we instead study how generalization scales with the number of trainable parameters and the number of samples in a feature-learning model. We analyze ℓ2\ell_2-regularized empirical test error minimization in a quadratic two-layer network in a finite-sample setting with structured data. This setting allows for an explicit characterization of the generalization error as a function of the number of samples, model width, and regularization. Our results reveal a phase diagram with distinct scaling regimes as the number of parameters varies. In particular, the generalization error follows data-dependent power laws controlled by the spectral structure of the target. We further characterize the transitions between regimes, including the onset of interpolation, and their impact on generalization.
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Neural Scaling Universality: If Exponents Are Fixed, Time to Understand Coefficients

Neural scaling laws describe how pre-training loss decays as power laws with training time, model size, and compute. This position paper argues that the exponents of these power laws are fixed by generic mechanisms: a one-third time scaling due to the strong nonlinearity of Softmax, an inverse width scaling due to representational superposition, and an inverse depth scaling due to ensemble averaging of Transformer layers. These mechanisms are robust to a wide range of data structures and architectural details, placing current large language models in a universality class with fixed exponents. The coefficients, however, are expected to be sensitive to data and architecture details, and directly determine practical quantities such as the optimal model shape and the compute-optimal frontier. We therefore argue that understanding the coefficients is the key to near-term performance improvements, and that a closer examination of the current universality class may reveal pathways to better universality classes.
Jun 18, 2026stat.ML

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.
Jun 18, 2026hep-ex

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.
Jun 6, 2026cs.LG

Explaining Data Mixing Scaling Laws

Recent research has established empirical scaling laws to predict model performance on multi-domain data mixtures. However, a theoretical understanding of these model loss behaviors remains absent. In this work, we propose a unified framework to explain the underlying mechanics of data mixing. Our approach extends theoretical perspectives originally developed for standard neural scaling laws (e.g., Kaplan and Chinchilla) to the multi-domain setting. Based on the distributional assumption that domains overlap on fundamental skills while diverging on specialized skills, we identify two key factors that govern the domain losses of models trained on different data mixtures: \textit{Capacity Competition}, where the allocation of finite model capacity couples domain losses globally, and \textit{Noise Reduction}, where optimal weights shift toward harder-to-learn domains to minimize overall noise. Empirical evaluations show that our framework outperforms existing baselines by fitting the loss landscape with a lower Mean Relative Error and identifying higher-performing training mixtures. Most importantly, our model successfully extrapolates across scales, predicting highly effective mixtures for large, unseen scales using parameters fitted on smaller ones. In addition, our model achieves these results using significantly fewer parameters compared to previous empirical laws. Our code is available at https://github.com/meiqwq/Explaining-Data-Mixing-Scaling-Laws.
Jun 4, 2026eess.IV

Compute-Optimal Network Design for Echocardiography Myocardial Segmentation and Perfusion Quantification using Neural Scaling Laws

Myocardial perfusion quantification using contrast-enhanced ultrasound offers a bedside non-ionizing alternative to nuclear imaging modalities. However, its clinical adoption is hindered by time-consuming manual labelling. Automated segmentation has proved challenging due to a paucity of in-domain training data. Adapting strategies currently used to optimise large language models for large datasets, we apply neural scaling laws to predict network performance for myocardial segmentation. We extrapolate performance on subsets of the data to determine optimal network size on the CAMUS echocardiography dataset and a 25-patient contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) dataset. Finally, we validate the clinical utility of our models by comparing the final myocardial perfusion parameters with those obtained by a senior cardiologist. Extrapolation based on the scaling law is predictive of test loss at the full dataset size, allowing us to select two networks that obtained state-of-the-art performance on CAMUS with a 240-fold reduction in parameter count. We observe the gradient of the scaling law transfers from CAMUS to the CEUS dataset with a bias in the predicted losses. The automatically segmented masks perform equivalently to a senior cardiologist in myocardial perfusion quantification. These results establish neural scaling laws as a practical tool for data-driven compute-optimal model design for small imaging datasets.
Jun 2, 2026cs.LG

Neuron Populations Exhibit Divergent Selectivity with Scale

We investigate whether neuron populations within neural networks evolve predictably with scale, extending scaling laws beyond macroscopic observables such as loss. To probe this question, we study Rosetta Neurons, a previously characterized class of neurons whose activation patterns are similar across independently trained models (Dravid et al., 2023). In separate analyses of language models up to 30B parameters and vision models up to 5B parameters, we observe that the population of Rosetta Neurons follows a sublinear power law in model size, growing in absolute number but occupying a shrinking fraction of the total neuron count. We further observe a Neuron Polarization Effect: Rosetta Neurons become more selective and increasingly monosemantic with scale, separating from a growing non-Rosetta population that remains less selective. An analytical model balancing feature utility against limited neuron capacity explains the sublinear power-law scaling and this polarization effect. Finally, we find that Rosetta Neurons become more domain-specialized with scale and illustrate their selectivity through a targeted data-filtering case study for continued pretraining. Our results point to a scaling law for interpretable, shared neuron-level structure, linking model size to systematic changes in neuron universality, selectivity, and specialization.
May 31, 2026cs.LG

Structure and Scale in Simplicial Sequence Modelling

Modern large-scale deep learning exhibits two striking empirical phenomena: behavioural scaling laws (predictable performance gains with increasing scale) and emergent mechanisms (structured internal representations and circuits in deep neural networks). We hypothesise that these two phenomena are connected: that predictable changes in behaviour are the result of predictable changes in internal computational structure. In this paper, we report preliminary evidence of such a connection. We find a correlation between scaling patterns in performance and representations in small transformers trained to predict the outputs of a hidden Markov model, for which residual activations are known to linearly encode a belief distribution over latent states in a probability simplex.
May 29, 2026cs.LG

Spectral Reach: Understanding Neural Scaling as Progress into the Spectral Tail

Neural scaling laws describe predictable power-law relationships between model size, dataset size, compute, and performance. While these laws guide the development of modern foundation models, the mechanisms underpinning them remain poorly understood, in part due to the absence of scalable analysis tools. To close this gap, we introduce "spectral position": a scalable measure of which eigenvalues of the empirical neural tangent kernel (eNTK) currently drive loss reduction. Applying this measure to scaling experiments, we find that spectral position decreases throughout training: learning shifts from dominant eigenmodes into the spectral tail. Larger models reach further into the tail than smaller models, revealing a size-dependent capacity we call "spectral reach". This suggests why larger models achieve lower losses: they sustain learning on weak spectral signals inaccessible to smaller models. We further identify feature learning as a key enabler of spectral reach. It adaptively amplifies gradient magnitudes as learning advances, sustaining progress where frozen representations stall. This points to concrete interventions through architecture and optimizer design.
May 28, 2026cs.LG

How Much Is a Dataset Worth? Scaling Laws, the Vendi Score, and Matrix Spectral Functions

Neural scaling laws appraise data through dataset size, while the Vendi Score uses quantum entropy to measure dataset value. We show both that common neural-scaling-law objectives and the Vendi Score are submodular. We further show that the Vendi Score is a special case of a broader class of submodular objectives that we call matrix spectral functions. This also includes determinantal (DPP) objectives, as well as many others. We also introduce weakly matrix monotone functions and show how they lead to weakly submodular matrix spectral functions, yielding a broad family of practical objectives for data appraisal. We develop secular-equation-based updates that avoid repeated eigendecompositions during greedy optimization, reducing marginal-gain evaluation for mm-dimensional embeddings by an O(m)O(m) factor relative to oracle queries. This yields an average empirical speedup of about 35,000x, making direct optimization of the Vendi Score feasible on ImageNet-1K-scale datasets. Thus enabled, we compare how well several objectives predict the value of training subsets for held-out test performance under fixed-size, class-balanced, and fixed training-budget regimes, including the Vendi Score, DPPs, facility location, and three new matrix spectral variants. Across multiple datasets, facility location performs the best. Direct optimization also reveals that, while the Vendi Score is predictive over moderate score ranges, pushing the objective to higher values can make it a poor downstream performance proxy. We also find that uniformly at random fixed-size subsets, both unconstrained and class-balanced, are remarkably concentrated in both appraisal scores and held-out performance. Finally, we show that size, class balance, and training budget do not alone determine data value: even when controlling for these factors, performance ranges smoothly from good to bad.
May 28, 2026cs.LG

On the Optimizer Dependence of Neural Scaling Laws

The scaling exponent αα in neural scaling laws L(N)∝N−αL(N) \propto N^{-α} is commonly treated as a fixed constant set by architecture and data. We present evidence that αα depends systematically on the optimizer. In controlled random-feature regression experiments -- the canonical theoretical framework for neural scaling -- we measure αα across five optimizer variants and six spectral conditions. Preconditioned optimizers consistently yield steeper scaling (larger αα), with the αα-shift increasing across most of the tested spectral range, peaking near s=1.5s = 1.5, and remaining large at s=2.0s = 2.0. At s≈1.0s \approx 1.0 (characteristic of natural language), the full natural gradient achieves α≈0.31α\approx 0.31 versus α≈0.12α\approx 0.12 for gradient descent -- a 2.6×2.6\times larger fitted exponent that, within the random-feature model, compounds with each model-size doubling. Whether and how this exponent shift transfers to large-scale LLM training -- where recent evidence suggests the advantage may attenuate with scale -- remains an important open question. Our results imply that scaling-law forecasts should account for optimizer choice, and we provide a spectral diagnostic predicting when advanced optimizers will pay off.
May 27, 2026hep-ph

Neural Scaling Laws for Jet Generation

Recently observed empirical scaling laws describe the performance of foundation-type models as three independent key quantities -- dataset size, compute, and model parameters -- are modified. Extracting these scaling laws informs the training of large complex models for which the tuning of hyperparameters in traditional ways is not feasible. This work for the first time explores if scaling laws can also be observed for the task of particle jet generation -- both relevant as a pre-training objective for foundation models and as in-situ simulation by itself. We indeed replicate the key logarithmic scaling law behavior for model-size scaling. Beyond studying the next token prediction validation loss of the generative model, we also study the sliced Wasserstein distance of five physical quantities that are not immediately available to the model during training. Our study shows that this quantity is monotonically related to the next token prediction validation loss, meaning that this loss is indeed a good proxy for the physics performance. For the scaling with dataset size and compute, we observe substantially weaker scaling behavior of both the loss and the sliced Wasserstein distance. We analyze this behavior by introducing the concept of a learnable window, and argue that autoregressive next token prediction on jet constituents exhibits comparatively rapid saturation relative to language-model studies. We discuss possible origins of this behavior, including the stochastic nature of QCD radiation and differences between generative and supervised learning tasks in collider physics.
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Pretrained Approximators for Low-Thrust Trajectory Cost and Reachability

Low-thrust trajectory design relies heavily on repeated evaluations of fuel consumption and transfer feasibility, which require expensive optimal control solutions. In this work, we show these quantities can be accurately approximated by machine learning surrogates, enabling fast and scalable evaluation across a wide range of scenarios. By increasing both dataset size and model capacity, we observe that low-thrust trajectory optimization follows a scaling law, with performance improving linearly with the logarithm of training data and network parameters, and no evidence of saturation within the explored regime. Guided by this observation, we construct a large-scale dataset using the proposed homotopy-ray strategy tailored to mission design requirements. A key is the introduction of a self-similar transformation, which allows generalization across semi-major axes, inclinations, and central bodies avoiding retraining. As a result, the same neural approximator can be applied to diverse orbital environments and mission classes. The proposed models accurately predict optimal fuel consumption and minimum transfer time for single- and multi-revolution transfers. Their performance and generalization are demonstrated on a public dataset, a multi-asteroid flyby problem from the Global Trajectory Optimization Competition, and an asteroid rendezvous mission design. The models and datasets are released as open-source to support the space community.
May 25, 2026cs.LG

Unified Neural Scaling Laws

We present a functional form (that we refer to as a Unified Neural Scaling Law (UNSL)) that accurately models and extrapolates the scaling behaviors of deep neural networks as multiple dimensions all vary simultaneously (i.e. how the evaluation metric of interest varies as one simultaneously varies the number of model parameters, training dataset size, number of training steps, number of inference steps, amount of compute, and various hyperparameters) for various architectures and for each of various tasks within a varied set of upstream and downstream tasks. This set includes large-scale vision, language, math, and reinforcement learning. When compared to other functional forms for neural scaling, this functional form yields extrapolations of scaling behavior that are considerably more accurate on this set.
May 22, 2026stat.ML

Asymmetric Scaling Laws from Sparse Features

We introduce a model for neural scaling laws under sparse activations. In the model, test loss is often dominated by rare coordinates that are never observed in the training input. This mechanism induces a novel bottleneck absent from dense models. We derive the asymptotic population loss in both the underparameterized and overparameterized regimes, and show that the loss exhibits a double-descent peak near the interpolation threshold -- where the number of parameters is just sufficient to fit the training data -- resulting in a loss curve governed by two distinct scaling exponents -- one for the overparameterized regime and one for the underparameterized regime -- with a gap determined by the degree of sparsity. Additionally, we derive a compute-optimal frontier that favors increasing dataset size over model capacity under fixed compute budgets. We also analyze gradient-descent dynamics and identify a scaling law for the probability that fixed-step gradient descent becomes unstable. We further show that the sparsity-induced effect persists under nonlinear activations.
May 21, 2026cs.LG

A Boundary-Layer Mechanism for One-Third Scaling in Online Softmax Classification

Hard-label classification is usually trained with smooth surrogate losses, most prominently softmax cross-entropy. We isolate an asymptotic mechanism by which this mismatch between smooth surrogate and discrete labels produces power-law learning curves in an online teacher-student model. After subtracting the mean logit, the thermodynamic-limit dynamics close in centered variables: a growing centered student-teacher alignment DD and the residual student variance ΔΔ. At late times, examples away from teacher decision boundaries are already classified confidently and contribute exponentially little. Only boundary layers of width O(D−1)O(D^{-1}) remain active, while the noise of fixed-learning-rate online gradient descent maintains a nonzero ΔΔ. As a function of the training time αα the late-time solution yields a α−1/3α^{-1/3} power law not only for the test loss but also for the generalization error εgε_g, i.e., one minus test accuracy. This is much slower than the α−1α^{-1} Bayes-optimal reference for the same model. We further show that learning-rate schedules can improve the generalization error towards a εg∼α−1/2ε_g \sim α^{-1/2} power law. Simulations support the predicted order parameter dynamics and learning curves. Controlled experiments with correlated Gaussian inputs and whitened pretrained features show that data structure can dominate transients. Therefore, our result is an asymptotic, complementary mechanism rather than an alternative to spectral explanations of neural scaling laws.
May 17, 2026cs.LG

How Do Electrocardiogram Models Scale?

While scaling laws have established a fundamental framework for foundation models in natural language processing, their applicability to electrocardiogram (ECG) models remains poorly characterized. Indeed, recent studies do not always yield consistent downstream gains as one increases the model size or pre-training dataset size of ECG models, leaving the exact roles of architectural inductive biases, pre-training paradigms, and expected improvements with size largely unanswered. In this work, we systematically investigate neural and loss-to-loss scaling laws within the ECG domain. By pre-training over 120120 models (ranging from 2020K to 200200M parameters) on the large-scale CODE dataset (2.32.3M records), we decouple the effects of model architecture (ResNet vs. Transformer) and pre-training paradigm, namely supervised learning (SL) versus self-supervised learning (SSL). We found that (i) SL models are data-bottlenecked in-distribution, whereas SSL models scale robustly across both model and data sizes; (ii) for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, ResNets are 1.31.3 to 2.52.5 times more parameter-efficient than Transformers, while SSL is up to 1616 times more data-efficient and achieves up to 7.67.6 times higher transfer efficiency than SL on unseen clinical tasks; (iii) across the observed scales, ResNet-based models generally achieve the lowest OOD loss, with SSL dominating on unseen clinical tasks and self-supervised Transformers overtaking at very large model sizes. Our results suggest that the path to effective ECG foundation models lies in the strategic alignment of architecture and paradigm rather than brute-force scaling.
May 12, 2026cs.LG

Scaling Laws and Tradeoffs in Recurrent Networks of Expressive Neurons

Cortical neurons are complex, multi-timescale processors wired into recurrent circuits, shaped by long evolutionary pressure under stringent biological constraints. Mainstream machine learning, by contrast, predominantly builds models from extremely simple units, a default inherited from early neural-network theory. We treat this as a normative architectural question. How should one split a fixed parameter budget PP between the number of units NN, per-unit effective complexity kek_e, and per-unit connectivity kck_c? What controls the optimal allocation? This calls for a model in which per-unit complexity can be tuned independently of width and connectivity. Accordingly, we introduce the ELM Network, whose recurrent layer is built from Expressive Leaky Memory (ELM) neurons, chosen to mirror functional components of cortical neurons. The architecture allows for individually adjusting NN, kek_e, and kck_c and trains stably across orders of magnitude in scale. We evaluate the model on two qualitatively different sequence benchmarks: the neuromorphic SHD-Adding task and Enwik8 character-level language modeling. Performance improves monotonically along each of the three axes individually. Under a fixed budget, a clear non-trivial optimum emerges in their tradeoff, and larger budgets favor both more and more complex neurons. A closed-form information-theoretic model captures these tradeoffs and attributes the diminishing returns at two ends to: per-neuron signal-to-noise saturation and across-neuron redundancy. A hyperparameter sweep spanning three orders of magnitude in trainable parameters traces a near-Pareto-frontier scaling law consistent with the framework. This suggests that the simple-unit default in ML is not obviously optimal once this tradeoff surface is probed, and offers a normative lens on cortex's reliance on complex spatio-temporal integrators.
May 11, 2026stat.ML

Sharp feature-learning transitions and Bayes-optimal neural scaling laws in extensive-width networks

We study the information-theoretic limits of learning a one-hidden-layer teacher network with hierarchical features from noisy queries, in the context of knowledge transfer to a smaller student model. We work in the high-dimensional regime where the teacher width kk scales linearly with the input dimension dd -- a setting that captures large-but-finite-width networks and has only recently become analytically tractable. Using a heuristic leave-one-out decoupling argument, validated numerically throughout, we derive asymptotically sharp characterizations of the Bayes-optimal generalization error and individual feature overlaps via a system of closed fixed-point equations. These equations reveal that feature learnability is governed by a sequence of sharp phase transitions: as data grows, teacher features become recoverable sequentially, each through a discontinuous jump in overlap. This sequential acquisition underlies a precise notion of \textit{effective width} kck_c -- the number of learnable features at a given data budget nn -- which unifies two distinct scaling regimes: a feature-learning regime in which the Bayes-optimal generalization error εBO\varepsilon^{\rm BO} scales as n1/(2β)−1 n^{1/(2β)-1}, and a refinement regime in which it scales as n−1n^{-1}, where β>1/2β>1/2 is the exponent of the power-law feature hierarchy. Both laws collapse to the single relation εBO=Θ(kcd/n)\varepsilon^{\rm BO}=Θ(k_c d/n). We further show empirically that a student trained with \textsc{Adam} near the effective width kck_c achieves these optimal scaling laws (up to a small algorithmic gap), and provide an information-theoretic account of the associated scaling in model size.
May 10, 2026cs.AI

How Much is Brain Data Worth for Machine Learning?

If a person can solve a task, can measuring their brain make it easier to train a model to solve that task too? Recent NeuroAI work suggests that supplementing task training with neural recordings can modestly improve model performance and robustness. However, it is unclear when there should be a benefit from using neural data and how much benefit to expect. We formulate this question mathematically, and begin to address it theoretically using a simple, analytically tractable linear gaussian model of task targets and neural recordings. For a multimodal estimator trained on both brain data and task labels, we derive scaling laws for how performance scales with the numbers of brain and task samples. From these laws we derive relative value and exchange rates between brain samples and task samples, quantifying how much extra task samples neural data is worth as a function of task-brain alignment, neural and task noise, latent dimension, and brain data sample size. We also analyze test distribution shift, to identify conditions where brain-regularized learning can produce substantial robustness gains through learned invariances. Finally, under a fixed collection budget, we characterize the regimes in which brain data is worth collecting. Our results provide a foundation for understanding how valuable brain data could be for improving machine learning.
May 9, 2026cs.LG

Practical Scaling Laws: Converting Compute into Performance in a Data-Constrained World

The scaling laws guiding modern model training were calibrated for a single regime: data-rich, single-epoch pretraining. The dominant such scaling law form, Chinchilla's L=E+A/Nα+B/DβL = E + A/N^α+ B/D^β, has three structural limitations outside that regime: it diverges as unique data shrinks instead of saturating at the uninformed baseline; it cannot represent overfitting when capacity exceeds the data; and it conflates total examples seen with unique examples available. We propose a closed-form extension, L(N,D,T)=E+(L0−E) h/(1+h)L(N, D, T) = E + (L_0 - E)\,h/(1+h) with h=a/Nα+b/Tβ+c Nγ/Dδh = a/N^α+ b/T^β+ c\,N^γ/D^δ, that decomposes loss into undercapacity, undertraining, and overfitting terms. It saturates between the irreducible loss EE and an uninformed baseline L0L_0 fixed by the loss type, and reduces to Chinchilla in the data-rich, single-epoch limit. We validate it on four multi-epoch experiments spanning four architecture families (MLPs, ResNets, Fourier neural operators, and transformers) across vision, scientific ML, and language domains, and refit it to five published LLM scaling-law grids. Extrapolating to higher compute and larger unique data than seen at fit time, our form achieves state-of-the-art RMSE on every published LLM grid we evaluate and on most cells of our constructed experiments. Once calibrated, the form admits a cost-aware allocation that recovers Chinchilla's optimum when data is free and shifts toward smaller corpora and more epochs as data grows expensive.
May 8, 2026cs.LG

Tokens-per-Parameter Coverage Is Critical for Robust LLM Scaling Law Extrapolation

Neural scaling laws approximate a language model's loss as a power-law function of parameter count NN and token count DD. Following Chinchilla-style compute-optimal training, many studies fit scaling laws from runs performed under a fixed tokens-per-parameter (TPP) ratio kk and set D=kND = kN. We show that this collinear design, combined with the empirically common near-equality of the exponents governing NN and DD, induces an inherent ill-conditioning in the Gauss-Newton least-squares problem: the condition number of the design grows as the inverse square of the gap between the NN and DD-exponents. The scale coefficients become practically unidentifiable, with confidence intervals inflating by an order of magnitude or more, yielding a ``sloppy'' model whose extrapolations degrade sharply off the training ray. We prove this for four scaling-law formalisms and derive a closed-form TPP-diversity threshold that is necessary and sufficient for well-conditioned estimation. Empirically, non-collinear designs outperform collinear ones on held-out splits with a 97.3% win rate across four laws, five corpora, multiple floating point precision modes. We further show the degeneracy is rooted in Jacobian geometry and is not an artifact of the loss function: any smooth estimation objective whose curvature involves the Jacobian inherits the same ill-conditioning.
May 8, 2026cs.LG

A Qualitative Test-Risk Mechanism for Scaling Behavior in Normalized Residual Networks

The scaling behavior, in which test performance often improves as model size and data increase, is a central empirical phenomenon in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical basis remains incomplete. In this paper, we study depth expansion in normalized residual networks: starting from a trained model in an old hypothesis class, we insert a new residual block at an intermediate layer and ask when such an expansion can yield a provable improvement in test risk. We develop a unified framework that decomposes this question into representational gain, optimization gain, and generalization transfer. First, under a first-order descent condition near zero initialization, we prove that the expanded hypothesis class contains an auxiliary jumpboard model with strictly smaller population risk than the original model. Second, under norm control tailored to post-normalized residual architectures, we establish a norm-based Rademacher complexity bound for the expanded model class. These ingredients lead to two complementary test-risk guarantees: one route passes through population risk and is tighter when a positive population margin is available, while the other works directly at the train/test level, avoids Hoeffding transfer, and is more robust in degenerate regimes. Together, these results provide a theorem-driven mechanism under which residual depth expansion can improve test performance in normalized residual networks. More broadly, they suggest that scaling is inherently joint: depth creates new improving directions, width enhances the finite-sample observability of weak signals, and data determines whether the statistical cost of expansion can be controlled.
May 8, 2026cs.LG

On the Invariance and Generality of Neural Scaling Laws

Neural scaling laws establish a predictable relationship between model performance and data or compute, offering crucial guidance for resource allocation in new domains and tasks. Yet such laws are most needed precisely where they are hardest to obtain: fitting one for a new model task pair demands expensive sweeps that typically exhaust the very compute budget the law is meant to economize. This paper poses the research question of how to develop generalizable scaling laws: laws fit once on a well-resourced source domain and reliably transported to new domains where running a full sweep is infeasible, which requires a fundamental understanding of when and why scaling properties change. We address this by identifying the right invariants: scaling laws are preserved under bijective (information-preserving) transformations of the data and modified in predictable, information-theoretically grounded ways under non-bijective transformations that lower its information resolution ρρ: a single axis along which a law fit in one domain can be transported to another. We validate this across language, vision, and speech, and demonstrate two cross-domain applications: predicting scaling for language models trained on electronic health records from laws fit on general text, and predicting time-series classification scaling under varying levels of noise injection, recovering the data-scaling exponents to within 3%3\% error.
May 8, 2026cs.IT

How Big Should a Wireless Foundation Model Be?

Wireless foundation models are rapidly emerging as a key enabler of AI-native communication systems, yet a fundamental question remains unanswered: how large should these models be? We present a principled, physics-grounded answer, showing that the intrinsic dimensionality (dNL, the nonlinear manifold dimension of the channel) acts as the fundamental bottleneck, defining the scaling ceiling once a data-sufficient regime is reached. This dimensionality is not a design choice but a physical constraint: Maxwell's equations, finite scatterers, and antenna aperture inherently constrain wireless propagation environments to a limited number of degrees of freedom -- spanning 5-35 across both real-world OTA measurements and 3GPP-standardized channel models we evaluate -- orders of magnitude below the ~1,000-dimensional semantic space of language. As a consequence, we propose a scaling framework for wireless AI: taking NTN satellite channels as a representative case (dNL ~= 14), scaling gains diminish rapidly beyond ~30 million parameters, entering a stochastic asymptote above 70M where a further 1.6x increase (96M->150M) yields only 0.52 dB. Beyond this ceiling, inference-time adaptation via pilot-aided test-time training (TTT) is far more effective: a compact 12M-parameter model surpasses a static 96M model by 9.9 dB (NMSE, SNR = 20 dB) / 7.6 dB (MCM, SNR = 10 dB) at one-eighth the parameters. With dNL distributions validated across real-world indoor massive MIMO measurements, our scaling laws and TTT gains are demonstrated through NTN satellite simulations, reframing wireless AI design: channel geometry -- not model size -- fundamentally governs the scaling laws of physical-layer wireless AI.
May 5, 2026cs.LG

Deep Wave Network for Modeling Multi-Scale Physical Dynamics

Performance of deep learning models is strongly governed by architectural capacity, with width and depth as primary controls. However, in physical-science applications, models are often compared at a single fixed size or by separating accuracy and computational cost, which can be misleading since architectures exhibit different accuracy-cost scaling as width and depth vary. This issue is particularly relevant for U-Net-type encoder-decoder models, widely used for multi-scale gas, fluid, and plasma dynamics due to their ability to represent features across spatial scales. A U-Net constructs a multi-resolution representation via an encoder that progressively reduces spatial resolution, followed by a decoder that restores it for prediction. Skip connections link corresponding encoder and decoder features, preserving fine-scale information and improving optimization. In practice, U-Net width is routinely tuned, while depth is typically kept fixed (a set number of down/up-sampling stages with few convolutions per stage), limiting systematic exploration of depth for improving the accuracy-cost trade-off. We address this limitation by increasing effective depth through stacking multiple encoder-decoder "waves" in series, with skip connections both within and across waves to enable progressive cross-scale refinement. We call this architecture a Deep Wave Network (DW-Net). Training data, optimization, and schedules are kept identical across models. Instead of evaluating single configurations, we train multiple width variants of each architecture and compare accuracy vs. GPU time Pareto fronts. Across several 2D and 3D flow benchmarks, DW-Net models consistently improve the Pareto frontier over single-wave U-Nets, achieving higher accuracy at matched cost or similar accuracy at reduced cost, and reaching low-error regimes with up to 3x less training time under identical training settings.
May 2, 2026cs.LG

Prescriptive Scaling Laws for Data Constrained Training

Training compute is increasingly outpacing the availability of high-quality data. This shifts the central challenge from optimal compute allocation to extracting maximum value from limited data. The widely adopted Chinchilla scaling law assumes every training token is unique. This limits its ability to guide pretraining decisions in data-constrained regimes. We model the excess loss under repetition with a simple additive overfitting penalty and find that it accurately describes model behavior. Our scaling law yields qualitatively new compute-optimal allocation advice. Beyond a point, further repetition is counterproductive and compute is better spent on model capacity. We show that following our law's recommended configuration improves performance in data-constrained regimes. Finally, because our one-parameter form isolates overfitting in a single coefficient, it enables direct comparison across training configurations. As a case study, we show that strong weight decay (λ=1.0λ=1.0) reduces this coefficient by approximately 70%, providing a scaling-law explanation for recent findings that optimal weight decay in data-constrained regimes is an order of magnitude larger than standard practice.
Apr 27, 2026cs.LG

A Limit Theory of Foundation Models: A Mathematical Approach to Understanding Emergent Intelligence and Scaling Laws

Emergent intelligence have played a major role in the modern AI development. While existing studies primarily rely on empirical observations to characterize this phenomenon, a rigorous theoretical framework remains underexplored. This study attempts to develop a mathematical approach to formalize emergent intelligence from the perspective of limit theory. Specifically, we introduce a performance function E(N, P, K), dependent on data size N, model size P and training steps K, to quantify intelligence behavior. We posit that intelligence emerges as a transition from finite to effectively infinite knowledge, and thus recast emergent intelligence as existence of the limit lim⁡N,P,K→∞E(N,P,K)\lim_{N,P,K \to \infty} \mathcal{E}(N,P,K), with emergent abilities corresponding to the limiting behavior. This limit theory helps reveal that emergent intelligence originates from the existence of a parameter-limit architecture (referred to as the limit architecture), and that emergent intelligence rationally corresponds to the learning behavior of this limit system. By introducing tools from nonlinear Lipschitz operator theory, we prove that the necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of the limit architecture. Furthermore, we derive the scaling law of foundation models by leveraging tools of Lipschitz operator and covering number. Theoretical results show that: 1) emergent intelligence is governed by three key factors-training steps, data size and the model architecture, where the properties of basic blocks play a crucial role in constructing foundation models; 2) the critical condition Lip(T)=1 for emergent intelligence provides theoretical support for existing findings. 3) emergent intelligence is determined by an infinite-dimensional system, yet can be effectively realized in practice through a finite-dimensional architecture. Our empirical results corroborate these theoretical findings.
Apr 20, 2026q-bio.NC

OmniMouse: Scaling properties of multi-modal, multi-task Brain Models on 150B Neural Tokens

Scaling data and artificial neural networks has transformed AI, driving breakthroughs in language and vision. Whether similar principles apply to modeling brain activity remains unclear. Here we leveraged a dataset of 3.1 million neurons from the visual cortex of 73 mice across 323 sessions, totaling more than 150 billion neural tokens recorded during natural movies, images and parametric stimuli, and behavior. We train multi-modal, multi-task models that support three regimes flexibly at test time: neural prediction, behavioral decoding, neural forecasting, or any combination of the three. OmniMouse achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming specialized baselines across nearly all evaluation regimes. We find that performance scales reliably with more data, but gains from increasing model size saturate. This inverts the standard AI scaling story: in language and computer vision, massive datasets make parameter scaling the primary driver of progress, whereas in brain modeling -- even in the mouse visual cortex, a relatively simple system -- models remain data-limited despite vast recordings. The observation of systematic scaling raises the possibility of phase transitions in neural modeling, where larger and richer datasets might unlock qualitatively new capabilities, paralleling the emergent properties seen in large language models. Code available at https://github.com/enigma-brain/omnimouse.
Apr 19, 2026cs.LG

How Much Data is Enough? The Zeta Law of Discoverability in Biomedical Data, featuring the enigmatic Riemann zeta function

How much data is enough to make a scientific discovery? As biomedical datasets scale to millions of samples and AI models grow in capacity, progress increasingly depends on predicting when additional data will substantially improve performance. In practice, model development often relies on empirical scaling curves measured across architectures, modalities, and dataset sizes, with limited theoretical guidance on when performance should improve, saturate, or exhibit cross-over behavior. We propose a scaling-law framework for cross-modal discoverability based on spectral structure of data covariance operators, task-aligned signal projections, and learned representations. Many performance metrics, including AUC, can be expressed in terms of cumulative signal-to-noise energy accumulated across identifiable spectral modes of an encoder and cross-modal operator. Under mild assumptions, this accumulation follows a zeta-like scaling law governed by power-law decay of covariance spectra and aligned signal energy, leading naturally to the appearance of the Riemann zeta function. Representation learning methods such as sparse models, low-rank embeddings, and multimodal contrastive objectives improve sample efficiency by concentrating useful signal into earlier stable modes, effectively steepening spectral decay and shifting scaling curves. The framework predicts cross-over regimes in which simpler models perform best at small sample sizes, while higher-capacity or multimodal encoders outperform them once sufficient data stabilizes additional degrees of freedom. Applications include multimodal disease classification, imaging genetics, functional MRI, and topological data analysis. The resulting zeta law provides a principled way to anticipate when scaling data, improving representations, or adding modalities is most likely to accelerate discovery.
Feb 11, 2026cs.LG

μμpscaling small models: Principled warm starts and hyperparameter transfer

Modern large-scale neural networks are often trained and released in multiple sizes to accommodate diverse inference budgets. To improve efficiency, recent work has explored model upscaling: initializing larger models from trained smaller ones to accelerate convergence. However, this method can be sensitive to hyperparameters that need to be tuned at the target upscaled model size, which is prohibitively costly to do directly. It remains unclear whether tuning hyperparameters on smaller models and extrapolating via scaling laws is sound in this setting. We address this with principled approaches to width-based upscaling and efficient hyperparameter tuning in this setting. Motivated by μμP and any-dimensional architectures, we introduce a general upscaling method that, like Net2Net, copies and perturbs weights, but uses theoretically grounded, width-dependent scalings for the perturbation noise and optimizer hyperparameters. First, we prove that under zero perturbation, the upscaled model is functionally equivalent to the base model throughout training. Second, we extend the μμP theory to enable infinite-width limit analysis and establish hyperparameter transfer for upscaled models, greatly reducing the tuning cost. We empirically demonstrate that this method is effective on realistic datasets and architectures.
Feb 7, 2026cs.LG

Deriving Neural Scaling Laws from the statistics of natural language

Despite the fact that experimental neural scaling laws have substantially guided empirical progress in large-scale machine learning, no existing theory can quantitatively predict the exponents of these important laws for any modern LLM trained on any natural language dataset. We provide the first such theory in the case of data-limited scaling laws. We isolate two key statistical properties of language that alone can predict neural scaling exponents: (i) the decay of pairwise token correlations with time separation between token pairs, and (ii) the decay of the next-token conditional entropy with the length of the conditioning context. We further derive a simple formula in terms of these statistics that predicts data-limited neural scaling exponents from first principles without any free parameters or synthetic data models. Our theory exhibits a remarkable match with experimentally measured neural scaling laws obtained from training GPT-2 and LLaMA style models from scratch on two qualitatively different benchmarks, TinyStories and WikiText.
Dec 15, 2025cs.IT

From Zipf's Law to Neural Scaling through Heaps' Law and Hilberg's Hypothesis

We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation model -- such as a large language model -- changes with respect to the amount of training tokens, parameters, and compute. By contrast, Zipf's law posits that the distribution of tokens exhibits a power law tail. Whereas similar claims have been made in more specific settings, we show that the neural scaling law is a consequence of Zipf's law under certain broad assumptions that we reveal systematically. The derivation steps are as follows: We derive Heaps' law on the vocabulary growth from Zipf's law, Hilberg's hypothesis on the entropy scaling from Heaps' law, and the neural scaling from Hilberg's hypothesis. We illustrate these inference steps by a toy example of the Santa Fe process that satisfies all four statistical laws.
Jun 16, 2025stat.ML

Random Matrix Theory for Deep Learning: Beyond Eigenvalues of Linear Models

Modern Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) often operate on high-dimensional data and rely on overparameterized models, where classical low-dimensional intuitions break down. In particular, the proportional regime where the data dimension, sample size, and number of model parameters are all large and comparable, gives rise to novel and sometimes counterintuitive behaviors. This paper extends traditional Random Matrix Theory (RMT) beyond eigenvalue-based analysis of linear models to address the challenges posed by nonlinear ML models such as DNNs in this regime. We introduce the concept of High-dimensional Equivalent, which unifies and generalizes both Deterministic Equivalent and Linear Equivalent, to systematically address three technical challenges: high dimensionality, nonlinearity, and the need to analyze generic eigenspectral functionals. Leveraging this framework, we provide precise characterizations of the training and generalization performance of linear models, nonlinear shallow networks, and deep networks. Our results capture rich phenomena, including scaling laws, double descent, and nonlinear learning dynamics, offering a unified perspective on the theoretical understanding of deep learning in high dimensions.