Competing nonlinearities, criticality, and order-to-chaos transition in deep networks

Abstract

Deep neural networks owe their expressive power to nonlinear activation functions. The effective field theory of signal propagation at initialization reveals a few distinct universality classes of activations that exhibit different depth scaling. Tuning across these, especially with analytical control, is an open problem. We show that a statistical mixture of activations, where each neuron independently and randomly draws its activation from a two-component distribution with mixing fraction $p$, provides a new mechanism for a continuous phase transition. Applied to a mixture of Tanh and Swish, the transition is sharp in the depth scaling of the preactivation variance, separating a variance-collapsing from a variance-inflating phase; at $p_c$, the network acquires statistical scale invariance, with depth-independent variance, without sacrificing smoothness. This resolves a longstanding tension, where scale-invariant propagation has previously required the non-smooth ReLU family, rendering such networks ill-suited to curvature-based optimizers, physics-informed architectures, and neural-network quantum states. We corroborate the transition through variance propagation, parallel and perpendicular susceptibilities, and Lyapunov exponents. Training multilayer perceptrons on real datasets reveals non-monotonic test performance as a function of $p$, with an optimum near the theoretically predicted $p_c$, confirming that the initialization-level transition has direct consequences for learned representations. The quenched activation disorder acts as a structural regularizer, suppressing memorization of corrupted labels while preserving generalization. Our framework establishes statistical activation mixtures as a controlled tool for navigating the phase diagram of deep network universality classes.