Explainers
No explainer here yet. This is the kind of cell that gets one as soon as something in the queue earns it.
Unread — 6
Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise
The founding paper: extended dissipative systems tune themselves into a critical state, giving 1/f noise and fractal structure.
Physical Review Letters paper · Dec 2003Neuronal Avalanches in Neocortical Circuits
Cortical activity propagates as power-law-distributed avalanches with a branching parameter of ~1 — the critical value.
The Journal of Neuroscience paper · Oct 2013Power laws and Self-Organized Criticality in Theory and Nature
Physics Reports review comparing three model classes that generate power laws, then asking where nature is actually critical.
arXiv 1310.5527 paper · Feb 2021Self-Organized Criticality in the Brain
Reviews four cortical motifs — up-states, nested oscillations, avalanches, coherence potentials — as evidence for brain criticality.
arXiv 2102.09124 paper · Nov 2016Deep Information Propagation
Mean-field theory of random deep nets: depth scales diverge only at the order–chaos boundary, so only critical init trains.
arXiv 1611.01232 paper · Feb 2021Gradient Descent on Neural Networks Typically Occurs at the Edge of Stability
Full-batch gradient descent drives the top Hessian eigenvalue just past 2/step-size and then trains there, at the edge of instability.
arXiv 2103.00065