English
Related papers

Related papers: Why flatness does and does not correlate with gene…

200 papers

Overparameterised deep neural networks (DNNs) are highly expressive and so can, in principle, generate almost any function that fits a training dataset with zero error. The vast majority of these functions will perform poorly on unseen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Chris Mingard , Guillermo Valle-Pérez , Joar Skalse , Ard A. Louis

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

We study the phenomenon that some modules of deep neural networks (DNNs) are more critical than others. Meaning that rewinding their parameter values back to initialization, while keeping other modules fixed at the trained parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Niladri S. Chatterji , Behnam Neyshabur , Hanie Sedghi

Measuring the generalization performance of a Deep Neural Network (DNN) without relying on a validation set is a difficult task. In this work, we propose exploiting Latent Geometry Graphs (LGGs) to represent the latent spaces of trained DNN…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Carlos Lassance , Louis Béthune , Myriam Bontonou , Mounia Hamidouche , Vincent Gripon

The classical statistical learning theory implies that fitting too many parameters leads to overfitting and poor performance. That modern deep neural networks generalize well despite a large number of parameters contradicts this finding and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Masaaki Imaizumi , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Normalization layers (e.g., Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization) were introduced to help with optimization difficulties in very deep nets, but they clearly also help generalization, even in not-so-deep nets. Motivated by the long-held…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjeev Arora

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

Generalization is the key capability for deep neural networks (DNNs). However, it is challenging to give a reliable measure of the generalization ability of a DNN via only its nature. In this paper, we propose a novel method for estimating…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Yang Zhao , Hao Zhang

A large body of theory and empirical work hypothesizes a connection between the flatness of a neural network's loss landscape during training and its performance. However, there have been conceptually opposite pieces of evidence regarding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yizhou Xu , Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Isaac Chuang , Liu Ziyin

In this paper, we study the sharpness of a deep learning (DL) loss landscape around local minima in order to reveal systematic mechanisms underlying the generalization abilities of DL models. Our analysis is performed across varying network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-07 Devansh Bisla , Jing Wang , Anna Choromanska

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

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

Domain generalization (DG) seeks to learn robust models that generalize well under unknown distribution shifts. As a critical aspect of DG, optimizer selection has not been explored in depth. Currently, most DG methods follow the widely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Xingxuan Zhang , Renzhe Xu , Han Yu , Yancheng Dong , Pengfei Tian , Peng Cu

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

Deep neural networks (DNNs) generalize remarkably well without explicit regularization even in the strongly over-parametrized regime where classical learning theory would instead predict that they would severely overfit. While many…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-04-23 Guillermo Valle-Pérez , Chico Q. Camargo , Ard A. Louis

Existing generalization measures that aim to capture a model's simplicity based on parameter counts or norms fail to explain generalization in overparameterized deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce a new, theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Lorenz Kuhn , Clare Lyle , Aidan N. Gomez , Jonas Rothfuss , Yarin Gal

Deep Neural Networks can generalize despite being significantly overparametrized. Recent research has tried to examine this phenomenon from various view points and to provide bounds on the generalization error or measures predictive of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Parth Natekar , Manik Sharma

Generalization of deep neural networks remains one of the main open problems in machine learning. Previous theoretical works focused on deriving tight bounds of model complexity, while empirical works revealed that neural networks exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-31 James Wang , Cheng-Lin Yang

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

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are typically optimized using various forms of mini-batch gradient descent algorithm. A major motivation for mini-batch gradient descent is that with a suitably chosen batch size, available computing resources…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Oyebade K. Oyedotun , Konstantinos Papadopoulos , Djamila Aouada