The lack of crisp mathematical models that capture the structure of real-world data sets is a major obstacle to the detailed theoretical understanding of deep neural networks. Here, we first demonstrate the effect of structured data sets by experimentally comparing the dynamics and the performance of two-layer networks trained on two different data sets: (i) an unstructured synthetic data set containing random i.i.d. inputs, and (ii) a simple canonical data set containing MNIST images. Our analysis reveals two phenomena related to the dynamics of the networks and their ability to generalise that only appear when training on structured data sets. Second, we introduce a generative model for data sets, where high-dimensional inputs lie on a lower-dimensional manifold and have labels that depend only on their position within this manifold. We call it the hidden manifold model and we experimentally demonstrate that training networks on data sets drawn from this model reproduces both the phenomena seen during training on MNIST.
The paper studies how different settings of data structure affect learning of neural networks and how to mimic the behavior of neural networks seen on real datasets (e.g. MNIST) when learning on a synthetic one.
I would recommend rejecting the paper due to several issues pointed out below.
1. The paper abuses blanket citation making it difficult to identify and verify contribution and conduct a comparison with existing literature. Related work section amounts only to one paragraph in size. It looks questionable, that nobody ever treated the problem of the generalization ability of neural networks from a point of the data manifold properties. After a quick search, for example, [1] provides an in-depth analysis and generalization bounds for two-layered neural networks and provides a data complexity measure that can discriminate between random labels (which are equivalent to the outputs of randomly initialized fixed teacher networks in this work) and true labels on structured datasets like MNIST and CIFAR. The paper fails to cite this work as well. 
2. The paper claims to experimentally identify key differences in the training dynamics of neural networks in teacher-student setup and on an MNIST task (binary classification into even and odd numbers).  One of the differences is the presence of plateaus in the learning curves in the vanilla teacher-student setup, however, as the paper states itself - this is a well established and studied characteristic of the setup, not something unexpected and new.
3. Overall, I have yet to see actionable development in this paper as it consists of observations that have been noticed and studied previously and presents no attempt at explanation or rigorous analysis.
As for the experiments:
The setting of the experiment in section 3.1 leaves space for improvement. For example, it would be interesting to see whether two neural networks learned in the vanilla teacher-student setup on the iid random inputs agree on the MNIST inputs (i.e. inverting the experiment in 3.1) as a sanity check for other factors interplay since MNIST inputs would be an example of the out of distribution inputs for the networks learned on iid random examples used in the experiment. As another pointer, [2] shows that even when training input is from a standard normal distribution, the problem can have spurious local minima, implying that even on unstructured training datasets, neural networks from different initializations yield diverse outputs for out of distribution inputs, not agreeing among each other.
I would also like to see concrete examples when and how the hidden manifold model may benefit theoretical understanding or practical knowledge on, for example, how to cook a dataset or check if the dataset admits/affects learning.
References
[1] Arora, Sanjeev, et al. Fine-grained analysis of optimization and generalization for overparameterized two-layer neural networks.
[2] Safran, Itay, and Ohad Shamir. Spurious local minima are common in two-layer relu neural networks.