Related papers: A Scale Invariant Flatness Measure for Deep Networ…
Classical analyses of gradient descent (GD) define a stability threshold based on the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, often termed sharpness. When the learning rate lies below this threshold, training is stable and the loss…
Flat minima are strongly associated with improved generalisation in deep neural networks. However, this connection has proven nuanced in recent studies, with both theoretical counterexamples and empirical exceptions emerging in the…
It was empirically confirmed by Keskar et al.\cite{SharpMinima} that flatter minima generalize better. However, for the popular ReLU network, sharp minimum can also generalize well \cite{SharpMinimacan}. The conclusion demonstrates that the…
Deep neural networks are highly expressive machine learning models with the ability to interpolate arbitrary datasets. Deep nets are typically optimized via first-order methods and the optimization process crucially depends on the…
We study the convergence of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for training $L$-hidden-layer linear residual networks (ResNets). We prove that for training deep residual networks with certain linear transformations…
We analyze recurrent neural networks with diagonal hidden-to-hidden weight matrices, trained with gradient descent in the supervised learning setting, and prove that gradient descent can achieve optimality \emph{without} massive…
Recent works have highlighted scale invariance or symmetry that is present in the weight space of a typical deep network and the adverse effect that it has on the Euclidean gradient based stochastic gradient descent optimization. In this…
A large body of theory and empirical work hypothesizes a connection between the flatness of a neural network's loss landscape during training and its performance. However, there have been conceptually opposite pieces of evidence regarding…
Despite extensive study, the significance of sharpness -- the trace of the loss Hessian at local minima -- remains unclear. We investigate an alternative perspective: how sharpness relates to the geometric structure of neural…
Recently, it has been observed that when training a deep neural net with SGD, the majority of the loss landscape's curvature quickly concentrates in a tiny *top* eigenspace of the loss Hessian, which remains largely stable thereafter.…
Despite the non-convex nature of their loss functions, deep neural networks are known to generalize well when optimized with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recent work conjectures that SGD with proper configuration is able to find wide…
Understanding the properties of well-generalizing minima is at the heart of deep learning research. On the one hand, the generalization of neural networks has been connected to the decision boundary complexity, which is hard to study in the…
The phenomenon that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) favors flat minima has played a critical role in understanding the implicit regularization of SGD. In this paper, we provide an explanation of this striking phenomenon by relating the…
We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a gradient-based optimization method for deep networks that has exhibited performance improvements on image and language prediction problems. We show that when SAM is applied with a convex…
Model reparametrization, which follows the change-of-variable rule of calculus, is a popular way to improve the training of neural nets. But it can also be problematic since it can induce inconsistencies in, e.g., Hessian-based flatness…
We apply state-of-the-art tools in modern high-dimensional numerical linear algebra to approximate efficiently the spectrum of the Hessian of modern deepnets, with tens of millions of parameters, trained on real data. Our results…
We develop regularization methods to find flat minima while training deep neural networks. These minima generalize better than sharp minima, yielding models outperforming baselines on real-world test data (which may be distributed…
By using the viewpoint of modern computational algebraic geometry, we explore properties of the optimization landscapes of the deep linear neural network models. After clarifying on the various definitions of "flat" minima, we show that the…
This paper studies the effect of data homogeneity on multi-agent stochastic optimization. We consider the decentralized stochastic gradient (DSGD) algorithm and perform a refined convergence analysis. Our analysis is explicit on the…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…