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This paper establishes risk convergence and asymptotic weight matrix alignment --- a form of implicit regularization --- of gradient flow and gradient descent when applied to deep linear networks on linearly separable data. In more detail,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-19 Dhagash Mehta , Tianran Chen , Tingting Tang , Jonathan D. Hauenstein

We study the properties of alignment, a form of implicit regularization, in linear neural networks under gradient descent. We define alignment for fully connected networks with multidimensional outputs and show that it is a natural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-18 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Eshaan Nichani , Daniel Bernstein , Caroline Uhler

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

We use smoothed analysis techniques to provide guarantees on the training loss of Multilayer Neural Networks (MNNs) at differentiable local minima. Specifically, we examine MNNs with piecewise linear activation functions, quadratic loss and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-31 Daniel Soudry , Yair Carmon

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods for training deep networks in practice. SGD is known to find a flat minimum that often generalizes well. However, it is mathematically unclear how deep learning can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-18 Zeke Xie , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

The training of neural networks by gradient descent methods is a cornerstone of the deep learning revolution. Yet, despite some recent progress, a complete theory explaining its success is still missing. This article presents, for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Etienne Boursier , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Training neural networks involves finding minima of a high-dimensional non-convex loss function. Knowledge of the structure of this energy landscape is sparse. Relaxing from linear interpolations, we construct continuous paths between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-25 Felix Draxler , Kambis Veschgini , Manfred Salmhofer , Fred A. Hamprecht

We study the implicit bias of gradient flow (i.e., gradient descent with infinitesimal step size) on linear neural network training. We propose a tensor formulation of neural networks that includes fully-connected, diagonal, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Chulhee Yun , Shankar Krishnan , Hossein Mobahi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-12 Talha Cihad Gulcu

It is important to understand how the popular regularization method dropout helps the neural network training find a good generalization solution. In this work, we show that the training with dropout finds the neural network with a flatter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Zhongwang Zhang , Hanxu Zhou , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Finding parameters in a deep neural network (NN) that fit training data is a nonconvex optimization problem, but a basic first-order optimization method (gradient descent) finds a global optimizer with perfect fit (zero-loss) in many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Zhiyan Ding , Shi Chen , Qin Li , Stephen Wright

The properties of flat minima in the empirical risk landscape of neural networks have been debated for some time. Increasing evidence suggests they possess better generalization capabilities with respect to sharp ones. First, we discuss…

Neural networks that land in flat regions of the loss landscape tend to generalise better than those in sharp regions. Sharpness-Aware Minimisation exploits this to improve generalisation. But function-preserving reparameterisation can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Michael Timothy Bennett

We study the implicit bias of flatness / low (loss) curvature and its effects on generalization in two-layer overparameterized ReLU networks with multivariate inputs -- a problem well motivated by the minima stability and edge-of-stability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Tongtong Liang , Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang , Rahul Parhi

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

When training a Neural Network, it is optimized using the available training data with the hope that it generalizes well to new or unseen testing data. At the same absolute value, a flat minimum in the loss landscape is presumed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Nicolas Lell , Ansgar Scherp

We prove linear convergence of gradient descent to a global optimum for the training of deep residual networks with constant layer width and smooth activation function. We show that if the trained weights, as a function of the layer index,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Rama Cont , Alain Rossier , RenYuan Xu

Empirical studies of the loss landscape of deep networks have revealed that many local minima are connected through low-loss valleys. Yet, little is known about the theoretical origin of such valleys. We present a general framework for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-24 Bo Zhao , Iordan Ganev , Robin Walters , Rose Yu , Nima Dehmamy

We study the type of solutions to which stochastic gradient descent converges when used to train a single hidden-layer multivariate ReLU network with the quadratic loss. Our results are based on a dynamical stability analysis. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Mor Shpigel Nacson , Rotem Mulayoff , Greg Ongie , Tomer Michaeli , Daniel Soudry