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Related papers: Unique Properties of Flat Minima in Deep Networks

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Deep neural networks have reshaped modern machine learning by learning powerful latent representations that often align with the manifold hypothesis: high-dimensional data lie on lower-dimensional manifolds. In this paper, we establish a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Nico Pelleriti , Max Zimmer , Elias Wirth , Sebastian Pokutta

Contemporary wisdom based on empirical studies suggests that standard recurrent neural networks (RNNs) do not perform well on tasks requiring long-term memory. However, precise reasoning for this behavior is still unknown. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-21 Melikasadat Emami , Mojtaba Sahraee-Ardakan , Parthe Pandit , Sundeep Rangan , Alyson K. Fletcher

We present a unified theoretical framework connecting the first property of Deep Neural Collapse (DNC1) to the emergence of implicit low-rank bias in nonlinear networks trained with $L^2$ weight decay regularization. Our main contributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Emanuele Zangrando , Piero Deidda , Simone Brugiapaglia , Nicola Guglielmi , Francesco Tudisco

Recent studies showed that the generalization of neural networks is correlated with the sharpness of the loss landscape, and flat minima suggests a better generalization ability than sharp minima. In this paper, we propose a novel method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yuyan Zhou , Ye Li , Lei Feng , Sheng-Jun Huang

Neural networks often operate in the overparameterized regime, in which there are far more parameters than training samples, allowing the training data to be fit perfectly. That is, training the network effectively learns an interpolating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Suzanna Parkinson , Greg Ongie , Rebecca Willett

We explore the low-rank structure of the weight matrices in neural networks at the stationary points (limiting solutions of optimization algorithms) with $L2$ regularization (also known as weight decay). We show several properties of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Ilja Kuzborskij , Yasin Abbasi Yadkori

Existing analyses of optimization in deep learning are either continuous, focusing on (variants of) gradient flow, or discrete, directly treating (variants of) gradient descent. Gradient flow is amenable to theoretical analysis, but is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Omer Elkabetz , Nadav Cohen

We analyze the loss landscape and expressiveness of practical deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with shared weights and max pooling layers. We show that such CNNs produce linearly independent features at a "wide" layer which has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Quynh Nguyen , Matthias Hein

For fixed training data and network parameters in the other layers the L1 loss of a ReLU neural network as a function of the first layer's parameters is a piece-wise affine function. We use the Deep ReLU Simplex algorithm to iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-07 Peter Hinz

Normalization layers are widely used in deep neural networks to stabilize training. In this paper, we consider the training of convolutional neural networks with gradient descent on a single training example. This optimization problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Zhenwei Dai , Reinhard Heckel

This paper shows a Min-Max property existing in the connection weights of the convolutional layers in a neural network structure, i.e., the LeNet. Specifically, the Min-Max property means that, during the back propagation-based training for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-30 Haojing Shen , Sihong Chen , Ran Wang

In the light of the fact that the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often finds a flat minimum valley in the training loss, we propose a novel directional pruning method which searches for a sparse minimizer in or close to that flat region.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Shih-Kang Chao , Zhanyu Wang , Yue Xing , Guang Cheng

Zeroth-order methods are extensively used in machine learning applications where gradients are infeasible or expensive to compute, such as black-box attacks, reinforcement learning, and language model fine-tuning. Existing optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Liang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil , Sewoong Oh , Michael Muehlebach , Niao He

We investigate the loss surface of neural networks. We prove that even for one-hidden-layer networks with "slightest" nonlinearity, the empirical risks have spurious local minima in most cases. Our results thus indicate that in general "no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Chulhee Yun , Suvrit Sra , Ali Jadbabaie

Recent literature generalization in deep learning has examined the relationship between the curvature of the loss function at minima and generalization, mainly in the context of overparameterized neural networks. A key observation is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Neta Shoham , Liron Mor-Yosef , Haim Avron

Deep neural networks (DNNs) for supervised learning can be viewed as a pipeline of the feature extractor (i.e., last hidden layer) and a linear classifier (i.e., output layer) that are trained jointly with stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Xin Li , Xiangrui Li , Deng Pan , Yao Qiang , Dongxiao Zhu

This paper presents an algorithm for searching for the minimum number of neurons in fully connected layers of an arbitrary network solving given problem, which does not require multiple training of the network with different number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Oleg I. Berngardt

Enforcing orthonormal or isometric property for the weight matrices has been shown to enhance the training of deep neural networks by mitigating gradient exploding/vanishing and increasing the robustness of the learned networks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Zhen Qin , Xuwei Tan , Zhihui Zhu

The success of gradient descent in ML and especially for learning neural networks is remarkable and robust. In the context of how the brain learns, one aspect of gradient descent that appears biologically difficult to realize (if not…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Shivam Garg , Santosh S. Vempala

Neural networks are a powerful class of functions that can be trained with simple gradient descent to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of applications. Despite their practical success, there is a paucity of results that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-06 Bo Xie , Yingyu Liang , Le Song