Dropout Universality: Scaling Laws and Optimal Scheduling at the Edge-of-Chaos
Lucas Fernandez Sarmiento
Sep 2026
Machine Learning
Data Science
Abstract
We ask whether the standard treatment of dropout as a static hyperparameter is optimal, or whether its utility can be improved by letting it vary over depth. We answer this by developing a mean-field theory of dropout near the edge of chaos, identifying distinct universality classes for smooth and kinked activations, together with their scaling exponents. The resulting propagation theory, constrained by maximizing the regularization delivered by dropout, motivates concentrating dropout near the input. Experiments on vision, speech and financial time series show gains most consistently in MLPs, with smaller gains in Transformers.
