English
Related papers

Related papers: Regularization Matters: Generalization and Optimiz…

200 papers

Generalization beyond a training dataset is a main goal of machine learning, but theoretical understanding of generalization remains an open problem for many models. The need for a new theory is exacerbated by recent observations in deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-08 Abdulkadir Canatar , Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-22 Kfir Y. Levy

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become increasingly important due to their excellent empirical performance on a wide range of problems. However, regularization is generally achieved by indirect means, largely due to the complex set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-02 Amal Rannen Triki , Maxim Berman , Matthew B. Blaschko

A recent line of research on deep learning focuses on the extremely over-parameterized setting, and shows that when the network width is larger than a high degree polynomial of the training sample size $n$ and the inverse of the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Zixiang Chen , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

A crucial problem in neural networks is to select the most appropriate number of hidden neurons and obtain tight statistical risk bounds. In this work, we present a new perspective towards the bias-variance tradeoff in neural networks. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Gen Li , Yuantao Gu , Jie Ding

In this work, we investigate the generalization properties of random feature methods. Our analysis extends prior results for Tikhonov regularization to a broad class of spectral regularization techniques and further generalizes the setting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Mike Nguyen , Nicole Mücke

Recently, significant progress has been made in understanding the generalization of neural networks (NNs) trained by gradient descent (GD) using the algorithmic stability approach. However, most of the existing research has focused on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Puyu Wang , Yunwen Lei , Di Wang , Yiming Ying , Ding-Xuan Zhou

We study the problem of training deep neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function using gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. In particular, we study the binary classification problem and show that for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Difan Zou , Yuan Cao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Understanding generalization in overparameterized neural networks hinges on the interplay between the data geometry, neural architecture, and training dynamics. In this paper, we theoretically explore how data geometry controls this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-08 Tongtong Liang , Alexander Cloninger , Rahul Parhi , Yu-Xiang Wang

We study the problem of training a two-layer neural network (NN) of arbitrary width using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) where the input $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{R}^d$ is Gaussian and the target $y \in \mathbb{R}$ follows a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-17 Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini , Sejun Park , Manuela Girotti , Ioannis Mitliagkas , Murat A. Erdogdu

The optimization foundations of deep linear networks have recently received significant attention. However, due to their inherent non-convexity and hierarchical structure, analyzing the loss functions of deep linear networks remains a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Po Chen , Rujun Jiang , Peng Wang

We establish explicit dynamics for neural networks whose training objective has a regularising term that constrains the parameters to remain close to their initial value. This keeps the network in a lazy training regime, where the dynamics…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-21 Eugenio Clerico , Benjamin Guedj

Neural networks have become standard tools in the analysis of data, but they lack comprehensive mathematical theories. For example, there are very few statistical guarantees for learning neural networks from data, especially for classes of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Mahsa Taheri , Fang Xie , Johannes Lederer

A main puzzle of deep neural networks (DNNs) revolves around the apparent absence of "overfitting", defined in this paper as follows: the expected error does not get worse when increasing the number of neurons or of iterations of gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-02 Tomaso Poggio , Qianli Liao , Brando Miranda , Andrzej Banburski , Xavier Boix , Jack Hidary

We analyze the effect of quantizing weights and activations of neural networks on their loss and derive a simple regularization scheme that improves robustness against post-training quantization. By training quantization-ready networks, our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Milad Alizadeh , Arash Behboodi , Mart van Baalen , Christos Louizos , Tijmen Blankevoort , Max Welling

Recent results on optimization and generalization properties of neural networks showed that in a simple two-layer network, the alignment of the labels to the eigenvectors of the corresponding Gram matrix determines the convergence of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Arman Rahbar , Emilio Jorge , Devdatt Dubhashi , Morteza Haghir Chehreghani

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the "kernel regime," i.e. when the network behaves during training as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the…

Larger and deeper networks generalise well despite their increased capacity to overfit. Understanding why this happens is theoretically and practically important. One recent approach looks at the infinitely wide limits of such networks and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Adrian Goldwaser , Hong Ge

Weight decay is one of the most widely used forms of regularization in deep learning, and has been shown to improve generalization and robustness. The optimization objective driving weight decay is a sum of losses plus a term proportional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Liu Yang , Jifan Zhang , Joseph Shenouda , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Kangwook Lee , Robert D. Nowak

When equipped with efficient optimization algorithms, the over-parameterized neural networks have demonstrated high level of performance even though the loss function is non-convex and non-smooth. While many works have been focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Zhiqi Bu , Shiyun Xu , Kan Chen