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Related papers: Flatness is a False Friend

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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

Flatness measures based on the spectrum or the trace of the Hessian of the loss are widely used as proxies for the generalization ability of deep networks. However, most existing definitions are either tailored to fully connected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Rahman Taleghani , Maryam Mohammadi , Francesco Marchetti

Recent works on over-parameterized neural networks have shown that the stochasticity in optimizers has the implicit regularization effect of minimizing the sharpness of the loss function (in particular, the trace of its Hessian) over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Khashayar Gatmiry , Zhiyuan Li , Ching-Yao Chuang , Sashank Reddi , Tengyu Ma , Stefanie Jegelka

It has been empirically observed that the flatness of minima obtained from training deep networks seems to correlate with better generalization. However, for deep networks with positively homogeneous activations, most measures of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Akshay Rangamani , Nam H. Nguyen , Abhishek Kumar , Dzung Phan , Sang H. Chin , Trac D. Tran

The training of over-parameterized neural networks has received much study in recent literature. An important consideration is the regularization of over-parameterized networks due to their highly nonconvex and nonlinear geometry. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Hongyang R. Zhang , Dongyue Li , Haotian Ju

The intuition that local flatness of the loss landscape is correlated with better generalization for deep neural networks (DNNs) has been explored for decades, spawning many different flatness measures. Recently, this link with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Shuofeng Zhang , Isaac Reid , Guillermo Valle Pérez , Ard Louis

Flatness of the loss curve around a model at hand has been shown to empirically correlate with its generalization ability. Optimizing for flatness has been proposed as early as 1994 by Hochreiter and Schmidthuber, and was followed by more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Linara Adilova , Amr Abourayya , Jianning Li , Amin Dada , Henning Petzka , Jan Egger , Jens Kleesiek , Michael Kamp

The performance of deep neural networks is often attributed to their automated, task-related feature construction. It remains an open question, though, why this leads to solutions with good generalization, even in cases where the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Henning Petzka , Linara Adilova , Michael Kamp , Cristian Sminchisescu

Large batch size training of Neural Networks has been shown to incur accuracy loss when trained with the current methods. The exact underlying reasons for this are still not completely understood. Here, we study large batch size training…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Zhewei Yao , Amir Gholami , Qi Lei , Kurt Keutzer , Michael W. Mahoney

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

Traditional analyses of gradient descent optimization show that, when the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian - often referred to as the sharpness - is below a critical learning-rate threshold, then training is 'stable' and training loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Lawrence Wang , Stephen J. Roberts

Sharpness (of the loss minima) is a common measure to investigate the generalization of neural networks. Intuitively speaking, the flatter the landscape near the minima is, the better generalization might be. Unfortunately, the correlation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Qiaozhe Zhang , Jun Sun , Ruijie Zhang , Yingzhuang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Adam Sandler , Diego Klabjan , Yuan Luo

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Lawrence Wang , Stephen J. Roberts

The mechanisms by which certain training interventions, such as increasing learning rates and applying batch normalization, improve the generalization of deep networks remains a mystery. Prior works have speculated that "flatter" solutions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Simran Kaur , Jeremy Cohen , Zachary C. Lipton

Models trained in federated settings often suffer from degraded performances and fail at generalizing, especially when facing heterogeneous scenarios. In this work, we investigate such behavior through the lens of geometry of the loss and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Debora Caldarola , Barbara Caputo , Marco Ciccone

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

The largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, or sharpness, of neural networks is a key quantity to understand their optimization dynamics. In this paper, we study the sharpness of deep linear networks for univariate regression. Minimizers can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Pierre Marion , Lénaïc Chizat

We consider the problem of generalization of arbitrarily overparameterized two-layer ReLU Neural Networks with univariate input. Recent work showed that under square loss, flat solutions (motivated by flat / stable minima and Edge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in developing optimization algorithms for overparameterized models as achieving generalization is believed to require algorithms with suitable biases. This interest centers on minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Behrooz Tahmasebi , Ashkan Soleymani , Dara Bahri , Stefanie Jegelka , Patrick Jaillet
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