The Gaussian equivalence of generative models for learning with shallow neural networks

Understanding the impact of data structure on the computational tractability of learning is a key challenge for the theory of neural networks. Many theoretical works do not explicitly model training data, or assume that inputs are drawn component-wise independently from some simple probability distribution. Here, we go beyond this simple paradigm by studying the performance of neural networks trained on data drawn from pre-trained generative models. This is possible due to a Gaussian equivalence...