Super Consistency of Neural Network Landscapes and Learning Rate Transfer

Abstract

Recently, there has been growing evidence that if the width and depth of a neural network are scaled toward the so-called rich feature learning limit (\mup and its depth extension), then some hyperparameters -- such as the learning rate -- exhibit transfer from small to very large models. From an optimization perspective, this phenomenon is puzzling, as it implies that the loss landscape is consistently similar across very different model sizes. In this work, we study the landscape through the lens of the loss Hessian, with a focus on its largest eigenvalue (i.e. the sharpness), and find that certain spectral properties under $\mu$P are largely independent of the size of the network, and remain consistent as training progresses. We name this property Super Consistency of the landscape. On the other hand, we show that in the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) and other scaling regimes, the sharpness exhibits very different dynamics at different scales. But what causes these differences in the sharpness dynamics? Through a connection between the Hessian's and the NTK's spectrum, we argue that the cause lies in the presence (for $\mu$P) or progressive absence (for the NTK scaling) of feature learning. We corroborate our claims with a substantial suite of experiments, covering a wide range of datasets and architectures: from ResNets and Vision Transformers trained on benchmark vision datasets to Transformers-based language models trained on WikiText.