Related papers: Flatness is a False Friend

Sparsifying neural networks often suffers from seemingly inevitable performance degradation, and it remains challenging to restore the original performance despite much recent progress. Motivated by recent studies in robust optimization, we…

We consider minimizing a smooth and strongly convex objective function using a stochastic Newton method. At each iteration, the algorithm is given an oracle access to a stochastic estimate of the Hessian matrix. The oracle model includes…

Current methods to interpret deep learning models by generating saliency maps generally rely on two key assumptions. First, they use first-order approximations of the loss function neglecting higher-order terms such as the loss curvatures.…

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…

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…

The Residual Network (ResNet), proposed in He et al. (2015), utilized shortcut connections to significantly reduce the difficulty of training, which resulted in great performance boosts in terms of both training and generalization error. It…

Deep neural network training often exhibits highly anisotropic loss geometry, where a few sharp dominant Hessian directions coexist with a large flatter bulk. Gradients tend to align disproportionately with these dominant directions,…

The capacity to generalize to future unseen data stands as one of the utmost crucial attributes of deep neural networks. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) aims to enhance the generalizability by minimizing worst-case loss using one-step…

Sharpness of minima is a promising quantity that can correlate with generalization in deep networks and, when optimized during training, can improve generalization. However, standard sharpness is not invariant under reparametrizations of…

Despite the tremendous success of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm in deep learning, little is known about how SGD finds generalizable solutions in the high-dimensional weight space. By analyzing the learning dynamics and loss…

We conjecture that the inherent difference in generalisation between adaptive and non-adaptive gradient methods in deep learning stems from the increased estimation noise in the flattest directions of the true loss surface. We demonstrate…

Despite their popularity in the field of continuous optimisation, second-order quasi-Newton methods are challenging to apply in machine learning, as the Hessian matrix is intractably large. This computational burden is exacerbated by the…

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…

Modern machine learning applications have witnessed the remarkable success of optimization algorithms that are designed to find flat minima. Motivated by this design choice, we undertake a formal study that (i) formulates the notion of flat…

Hessians of neural network (NN) contain essential information about the curvature of NN loss landscapes which can be used to estimate NN generalization capabilities. We have previously proposed generalization criteria that rely on the…

Recently, there has been growing evidence that if the width and depth of a neural network are scaled toward the so-called rich feature learning limit (\mup and its depth extension), then some hyperparameters -- such as the learning rate --…

This paper studies generalization capabilities of neural networks (NNs) using new and improved PyTorch library Loss Landscape Analysis (LLA). LLA facilitates visualization and analysis of loss landscapes along with the properties of NN…

We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…

Hessian-free (HF) optimization has been successfully used for training deep autoencoders and recurrent networks. HF uses the conjugate gradient algorithm to construct update directions through curvature-vector products that can be computed…