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Loss landscape analysis is extremely useful for a deeper understanding of the generalization ability of deep neural network models. In this work, we propose a layerwise loss landscape analysis where the loss surface at every layer is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-09 Adepu Ravi Sankar , Yash Khasbage , Rahul Vigneswaran , Vineeth N Balasubramanian

We present a new approach to understanding the relationship between loss curvature and input-output model behaviour in deep learning. Specifically, we use existing empirical analyses of the spectrum of deep network loss Hessians to ground…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Jack Valmadre , Simon Lucey

When several models have similar training scores, classical model selection heuristics follow Occam's razor and advise choosing the ones with least capacity. Yet, modern practice with large neural networks has often led to situations where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Luis Sa-Couto , Jose Miguel Ramos , Andreas Wichert

We present PYHESSIAN, a new scalable framework that enables fast computation of Hessian (i.e., second-order derivative) information for deep neural networks. PYHESSIAN enables fast computations of the top Hessian eigenvalues, the Hessian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Zhewei Yao , Amir Gholami , Kurt Keutzer , Michael Mahoney

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Kaiyue Wen , Zhiyuan Li , Tengyu Ma

Despite their empirical success, neural networks remain vulnerable to small, adversarial perturbations. A longstanding hypothesis suggests that flat minima, regions of low curvature in the loss landscape, offer increased robustness. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Nils Philipp Walter , Linara Adilova , Jilles Vreeken , Michael Kamp

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Lei Wu , Weijie J. Su

In this paper we study the generalization capabilities of fully-connected neural networks trained in the context of time series forecasting. Time series do not satisfy the typical assumption in statistical learning theory of the data being…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-30 Anastasia Borovykh , Cornelis W. Oosterlee , Sander M. Bohte

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Israel Mason-Williams , Gabryel Mason-Williams , Helen Yannakoudakis

Understanding the geometry of the loss landscape near a minimum is key to explaining the implicit bias of gradient-based methods in non-convex optimization problems such as deep neural network training and deep matrix factorization. A…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-05 Anil Kamber , Rahul Parhi

The majority of machine learning methods can be regarded as the minimization of an unavailable risk function. To optimize the latter, given samples provided in a streaming fashion, we define a general stochastic Newton algorithm and its…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-06-30 Claire Boyer , Antoine Godichon-Baggioni

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved impressive performance in collaborative filtering. However, GNNs tend to yield inferior performance when the distributions of training and test data are not aligned well. Also, training GNNs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Huiyuan Chen , Chin-Chia Michael Yeh , Yujie Fan , Yan Zheng , Junpeng Wang , Vivian Lai , Mahashweta Das , Hao Yang

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and variants have been surprisingly successful for training deep nets, several aspects of the optimization dynamics and generalization are still not well understood. In this paper, we present new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-26 Xinyan Li , Qilong Gu , Yingxue Zhou , Tiancong Chen , Arindam Banerjee

Adversarial training (AT) has become the de-facto standard to obtain models robust against adversarial examples. However, AT exhibits severe robust overfitting: cross-entropy loss on adversarial examples, so-called robust loss, decreases…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-07 David Stutz , Matthias Hein , Bernt Schiele

We show that the input correlation matrix of typical classification datasets has an eigenspectrum where, after a sharp initial drop, a large number of small eigenvalues are distributed uniformly over an exponentially large range. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Rubing Yang , Jialin Mao , Pratik Chaudhari

Information-theoretic (IT) generalization bounds have been used to study the generalization of learning algorithms. These bounds are intrinsically data- and algorithm-dependent so that one can exploit the properties of data and algorithm to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Ze Peng , Jian Zhang , Yisen Wang , Lei Qi , Yinghuan Shi , Yang Gao

In this paper, we develop a novel regularization method for deep neural networks by penalizing the trace of Hessian. This regularizer is motivated by a recent guarantee bound of the generalization error. We explain its benefits in finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Yucong Liu , Shixing Yu , Tong Lin

Flatness of the loss curve is conjectured to be connected to the generalization ability of machine learning models, in particular neural networks. While it has been empirically observed that flatness measures consistently correlate strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Henning Petzka , Michael Kamp , Linara Adilova , Cristian Sminchisescu , Mario Boley

Neural network pruning is a practical way for reducing the size of trained models and the number of floating-point operations. One way of pruning is to use the relative Hessian trace to calculate sensitivity of each channel, as compared to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jack Chong , Manas Gupta , Lihui Chen