Saddle-To-Saddle Dynamics in Deep ReLU Networks: Low-Rank Bias in the First Saddle Escape

When a deep ReLU network is initialized with small weights, GD is at first dominated by the saddle at the origin in parameter space. We study the so-called escape directions, which play a similar role as the eigenvectors of the Hessian for strict saddles. We show that the optimal escape direction features a low-rank bias in its deeper layers: the first singular value of the $\ell$-th layer weight matrix is at least $\ell^{\frac{1}{4}}$ larger than any other singular value. We also prove a number of related results about these escape directions. We argue that this result is a first step in proving Saddle-to-Saddle dynamics in deep ReLU networks, where GD visits a sequence of saddles with increasing bottleneck rank.

@article{bantzis2025_2505.21722,
  title={ Saddle-To-Saddle Dynamics in Deep ReLU Networks: Low-Rank Bias in the First Saddle Escape },
  author={ Ioannis Bantzis and James B. Simon and Arthur Jacot },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21722},
  year={ 2025 }
}