Initialization ideas

Initialization schemes and early-training interventions that change the loss landscape the optimizer sees.

△ Mechanism confirmed, baseline not beaten 2026

Spectral subspace initialization for nonlinear teachers

Use a bounded function of the response to form a supervised, label-weighted covariance of the input and initialize the first neural layer from its leading outlier eigenspace. For vector-valued responses, use a matrix-valued response preprocessing map so several label statistics are combined in one lifted spectral estimator.

Useful8/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Spectral phase transitions in Gaussian multi-index models arXiv:2608.12183