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Related papers: Flatness is a False Friend

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Flatness of the loss landscape has been widely studied as an important perspective for understanding the behavior and generalization of deep learning algorithms. Motivated by this view, we propose Flatness-Aware Stochastic Gradient Langevin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Stefano Bruno , Youngsik Hwang , Jaehyeon An , Sotirios Sabanis , Dong-Young Lim

This paper proposes a theoretical framework to evaluate and compare the performance of stochastic gradient algorithms for distributed learning in relation to their behavior around local minima in nonconvex environments. Previous works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Ying Cao , Zhaoxian Wu , Kun Yuan , Ali H. Sayed

Second-order methods for neural network optimization have several advantages over methods based on first-order gradient descent, including better scaling to large mini-batch sizes and fewer updates needed for convergence. But they are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-21 Huishuai Zhang , Caiming Xiong , James Bradbury , Richard Socher

In graph signal processing, learning the weighted connections between nodes from a set of sample signals is a fundamental task when the underlying relationships are not known a priori. This task is typically addressed by finding a graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Benjamin T. Brown , Haoxiang Zhang , Daniel L. Lau , Gonzalo R. Arce

Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-29 Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

Decentralized optimization has become a fundamental tool for large-scale learning systems; however, most existing methods rely on the classical Lipschitz smoothness assumption, which is often violated in problems with rapidly varying…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-08 Yanan Bo , Yongqiang Wang

It is well known that (stochastic) gradient descent has an implicit bias towards flat minima. In deep neural network training, this mechanism serves to screen out minima. However, the precise effect that this has on the trained network is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Rotem Mulayoff , Tomer Michaeli

Generalization is one of the most important problems in deep learning (DL). In the overparameterized regime in neural networks, there exist many low-loss solutions that fit the training data equally well. The key question is which solution…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2023-06-21 Ning Yang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu

We study the learning performance of gradient descent when the empirical risk is weakly convex, namely, the smallest negative eigenvalue of the empirical risk's Hessian is bounded in magnitude. By showing that this eigenvalue can control…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-02 Dominic Richards , Mike Rabbat

This report investigates the fitting of the Hessian or its inverse for stochastic optimizations using a Hessian fitting criterion derived from the preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD) method. This criterion is closely related…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-02 Xi-Lin Li

Least squares fitting is in general not useful for high-dimensional linear models, in which the number of predictors is of the same or even larger order of magnitude than the number of samples. Theory developed in recent years has coined a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-02-13 Martin Slawski , Matthias Hein

We investigate the stationary (late-time) training regime of single- and two-layer underparameterized linear neural networks within the continuum limit of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for synthetic Gaussian data. In the case of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Markus Gross , Arne P. Raulf , Christoph Räth

We propose a multidimensional smoothing spline algorithm in the context of manifold learning. We generalize the bending energy penalty of thin-plate splines to a quadratic form on the Sobolev space of a flat manifold, based on the Frobenius…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-13 Juno Kim

Classical statistical learning theory predicts that overparameterized models should exhibit severe overfitting, yet modern deep neural networks with far more parameters than training samples consistently generalize well. This contradiction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Zeran Johannsen

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent optimization framework aiming to improve the deep neural network generalization, through obtaining flatter (i.e. less sharp) solutions. As SAM has been numerically successful, recent papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-22 Kayhan Behdin , Rahul Mazumder

Various iterative reconstruction algorithms for inverse problems can be unfolded as neural networks. Empirically, this approach has often led to improved results, but theoretical guarantees are still scarce. While some progress on…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-08-16 Arash Behboodi , Holger Rauhut , Ekkehard Schnoor

Given an optimization problem, the Hessian matrix and its eigenspectrum can be used in many ways, ranging from designing more efficient second-order algorithms to performing model analysis and regression diagnostics. When nonlinear models…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-18 Zhenyu Liao , Michael W. Mahoney

Analyzing geometric properties of high-dimensional loss functions, such as local curvature and the existence of other optima around a certain point in loss space, can help provide a better understanding of the interplay between neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Lucas Böttcher , Gregory Wheeler

We investigate the topics of sensitivity and robustness in feedforward and convolutional neural networks. Combining energy landscape techniques developed in computational chemistry with tools drawn from formal methods, we produce empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-06 Timothy E. Wang , Yiming Gu , Dhagash Mehta , Xiaojun Zhao , Edgar A. Bernal

Graph neural networks are widely used tools for graph prediction tasks. Motivated by their empirical performance, prior works have developed generalization bounds for graph neural networks, which scale with graph structures in terms of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Haotian Ju , Dongyue Li , Aneesh Sharma , Hongyang R. Zhang