Papers › An Empirical Analysis of the Laplace and Neural Tangent Kernels

An Empirical Analysis of the Laplace and Neural Tangent Kernels

7 Aug 2022arXiv:2208.03761archive 2025-07-28

Ronaldas Paulius Lencevicius

The neural tangent kernel is a kernel function defined over the parameter distribution of an infinite width neural network. Despite the impracticality of this limit, the neural tangent kernel has allowed for a more direct study of neural networks and a gaze through the veil of their black box. More recently, it has been shown theoretically that the Laplace kernel and neural tangent kernel share the same reproducing kernel Hilbert space in the space of 𝕊ᵈ⁻¹ alluding to their equivalence. In this work, we analyze the practical equivalence of the two kernels. We first do so by matching the kernels exactly and then by matching posteriors of a Gaussian process. Moreover, we analyze the kernels in ℝᵈ and experiment with them in the task of regression.

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