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Related papers: Generalization Properties and Implicit Regularizat…

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We introduce a general framework for analyzing learning algorithms based on the notion of self-regularization, which captures implicit complexity control without requiring explicit regularization. This is motivated by previous observations…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-19 Max Schölpple , Liu Fanghui , Ingo Steinwart

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

Gradient descent can be surprisingly good at optimizing deep neural networks without overfitting and without explicit regularization. We find that the discrete steps of gradient descent implicitly regularize models by penalizing gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-20 David G. T. Barrett , Benoit Dherin

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

We argue that the optimization plays a crucial role in generalization of deep learning models through implicit regularization. We do this by demonstrating that generalization ability is not controlled by network size but rather by some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-10 Behnam Neyshabur , Ryota Tomioka , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Nathan Srebro

Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Navid Azizan , Babak Hassibi

In an attempt to better understand generalization in deep learning, we study several possible explanations. We show that implicit regularization induced by the optimization method is playing a key role in generalization and success of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-09-11 Behnam Neyshabur

Learned Optimizers (LOs), a type of Meta-learning, have gained traction due to their ability to be parameterized and trained for efficient optimization. Traditional gradient-based methods incorporate explicit regularization techniques such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Suraj Kumar Sahoo , Narayanan C Krishnan

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Yufeng Yang , Erin Tripp , Yifan Sun , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

Stochastic gradient descent procedures have gained popularity for parameter estimation from large data sets. However, their statistical properties are not well understood, in theory. And in practice, avoiding numerical instability requires…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-09-29 Panos Toulis , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Classical statistical learning theory predicts that overparameterized models should exhibit severe overfitting, yet modern deep neural networks with far more parameters than training samples consistently generalize well. This contradiction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Zeran Johannsen

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Implicit regularization refers to the tendency of local search algorithms to converge to low-dimensional solutions, even when such structures are not explicitly enforced. Despite its ubiquity, the mechanism underlying this behavior remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Jianhao Ma , Geyu Liang , Salar Fattahi

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-20 Lin Xiao , Tong Zhang

The classical statistical learning theory implies that fitting too many parameters leads to overfitting and poor performance. That modern deep neural networks generalize well despite a large number of parameters contradicts this finding and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Masaaki Imaizumi , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…

Computation · Statistics 2023-07-21 Jeffrey Negrea , Jun Yang , Haoyue Feng , Daniel M. Roy , Jonathan H. Huggins

The success of minimax learning problems of generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been observed to depend on the minimax optimization algorithm used for their training. This dependence is commonly attributed to the convergence speed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Farzan Farnia , Asuman Ozdaglar

In this paper, we study the generalization properties of Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) algorithms for supervised learning problems. We focus on the setting in which we train the MAML model over $m$ tasks, each with $n$ data points,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-18 Alireza Fallah , Aryan Mokhtari , Asuman Ozdaglar

Our work focuses on stochastic gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer. Research on this class of problem is quite limited, and until recently no non-asymptotic convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Michael R. Metel , Akiko Takeda

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade