Our theoretical understanding of deep learning has not kept pace with its empirical success. While network architecture is known to be critical, we do not yet understand its effect on learned representations and network behavior, or how this architecture should reflect task structure.In this work, we begin to address this gap by introducing the Gated Deep Linear Network framework that schematizes how pathways of information flow impact learning dynamics within an architecture. Crucially, because of the gating, these networks can compute nonlinear functions of their input. We derive an exact reduction and, for certain cases, exact solutions to the dynamics of learning. Our analysis demonstrates that the learning dynamics in structured networks can be conceptualized as a neural race with an implicit bias towards shared representations, which then govern the model's ability to systematically generalize, multi-task, and transfer. We validate our key insights on naturalistic datasets and with relaxed assumptions. Taken together, our work gives rise to general hypotheses relating neural architecture to learning and provides a mathematical approach towards understanding the design of more complex architectures and the role of modularity and compositionality in solving real-world problems. The code and results are available at https://www.saxelab.org/gated-dln .

通过引入门控深度线性网络框架，研究网络结构对学习动态产生的影响并理解它与任务之间的关系，表明结构化网络中的学习动态可以被概念化为具有向共享表示的神经竞赛，我们的分析为神经网络架构与学习之间的关系提出了一般性假设，并提供了理解更复杂架构设计以及模块化和组合在解决现实问题中起的作用的数学方法。

神经赛跑降维：门控网络中的抽象动态