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We study the SAM (Sharpness-Aware Minimization) optimizer which has recently attracted a lot of interest due to its increased performance over more classical variants of stochastic gradient descent. Our main contribution is the derivation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Enea Monzio Compagnoni , Luca Biggio , Antonio Orvieto , Frank Norbert Proske , Hans Kersting , Aurelien Lucchi

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed method that minimizes the sharpness of the training loss of a neural network. While its generalization improvement is well-known and is the primary motivation, we uncover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Maksym Andriushchenko , Dara Bahri , Hossein Mobahi , Nicolas Flammarion

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful method for improving generalization in machine learning models by minimizing the sharpness of the loss landscape. However, despite its success, several important questions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-05 Dimitris Oikonomou , Nicolas Loizou

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

Exponential Moving Average (EMA) is a widely used weight averaging (WA) regularization to learn flat optima for better generalizations without extra cost in deep neural network (DNN) optimization. Despite achieving better flatness, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Siyuan Li , Zicheng Liu , Juanxi Tian , Ge Wang , Zedong Wang , Weiyang Jin , Di Wu , Cheng Tan , Tao Lin , Yang Liu , Baigui Sun , Stan Z. Li

Deep neural networks have been increasingly used in safety-critical applications such as medical diagnosis and autonomous driving. However, many studies suggest that they are prone to being poorly calibrated and have a propensity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Chengli Tan , Yubo Zhou , Haishan Ye , Guang Dai , Junmin Liu , Zengjie Song , Jiangshe Zhang , Zixiang Zhao , Yunda Hao , Yong Xu

The correlation between the sharpness of loss minima and generalisation in the context of deep neural networks has been subject to discussion for a long time. Whilst mostly investigated in the context of selected benchmark data sets in the…

Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Toki Tahmid Inan , Mingrui Liu , Amarda Shehu

Targeting solutions over `flat' regions of the loss landscape, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool to improve generalizability of deep neural network based learning. While several SAM variants have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yilang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zixiang Chen , Junkai Zhang , Yiwen Kou , Xiangning Chen , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Quanquan Gu

The paper investigates the fundamental convergence properties of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recently proposed gradient-based optimization method [Foret et al., 2021] that significantly improves the generalization of deep neural…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-22 Pham Duy Khanh , Hoang-Chau Luong , Boris S. Mordukhovich , Dat Ba Tran

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has well-documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural network models. Accounting for sharpness in the loss function geometry, where neighborhoods of `flat minima' heighten generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bingcong Li , Yilang Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis

Model compression by way of parameter pruning, quantization, or distillation has recently gained popularity as an approach for reducing the computational requirements of modern deep neural network models for NLP. Inspired by prior works…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Clara Na , Sanket Vaibhav Mehta , Emma Strubell

Despite their overwhelming capacity to overfit, deep learning architectures tend to generalize relatively well to unseen data, allowing them to be deployed in practice. However, explaining why this is the case is still an open area of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-15 Laurent Dinh , Razvan Pascanu , Samy Bengio , Yoshua Bengio

Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has attracted much attention because of its surprising effectiveness in improving generalization performance. However, compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it is more prone to getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chengli Tan , Jiangshe Zhang , Junmin Liu , Yicheng Wang , Yunda Hao

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization due to complex and non-convex loss landscapes. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a popular solution that smooths the loss landscape by minimizing the maximized change of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Tianshuo Xu , Xiaoshuai Sun , Tongliang Liu , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

We propose an algorithm to explore the global optimization method, using SAT solvers, for training a neural net. Deep Neural Networks have achieved great feats in tasks like-image recognition, speech recognition, etc. Much of their success…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Subham S. Sahoo

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer enhances the generalization ability of the machine learning model by exploring the flat minima landscape through weight perturbations. Despite its empirical success, SAM introduces an additional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Yifei Cheng , Li Shen , Hao Sun , Nan Yin , Xiaochun Cao , Enhong Chen

Flat regions of the neural network loss landscape have long been hypothesized to correlate with better generalization properties. A closely related but distinct problem is training models that are robust to internal perturbations to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Philip Jacobson , Ben Feinberg , Suhas Kumar , Sapan Agarwal , T. Patrick Xiao , Christopher Bennett

Pretraining optimizers are tuned to produce the strongest possible base model, on the assumption that a stronger starting point yields a stronger model after subsequent changes like post-training and quantization. This overlooks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Ishaan Watts , Catherine Li , Sachin Goyal , Jacob Mitchell Springer , Aditi Raghunathan