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Fall 2025 Submitted January 2026

Detecting Phase Transitions Through Persistent Homology

Tatyana Polevaya

Mentored by Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel, Max Hennick

Working report from the SPAR program. May not reflect the authors' current views.

Abstract

Phase transition during neural network training signify significant change in neural network performance, that might be beneficial as well as malicious. Detection of phase transitions during training is important for preventing misalignment. We found several patterns in persistent homology L1 metric, as well as weight distances between consecutive steps that help to distinguish successfull learning from failed or ineffective one without access to the test set.