English
Related papers

Related papers: Understanding Gradient Descent on Edge of Stabilit…

200 papers

In this paper we investigate the generalization error of gradient descent (GD) applied to an $\ell_2$-regularized OLS objective function in the linear model. Based on our analysis we develop new methodology for computationally tractable and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Thomas Stark , Lukas Steinberger

We systematically analyze optimization dynamics in deep neural networks (DNNs) trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study the effect of learning rate $\eta$, depth $d$, and width $w$ of the neural network. By analyzing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Dayal Singh Kalra , Maissam Barkeshli

In modern deep learning, weight decay is often credited with "stabilizing" training dynamics, diverging from its classical role as a static regularization penalty. We investigate a fundamental question: *does weight decay stabilize training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Marius Saether , Amir Kolic , Tomaso Poggio , Pierfrancesco Beneventano

Sign-based optimization methods have become popular in machine learning due to their favorable communication cost in distributed optimization and their surprisingly good performance in neural network training. Furthermore, they are closely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Lukas Balles , Fabian Pedregosa , Nicolas Le Roux

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Symmetries are prevalent in deep learning and can significantly influence the learning dynamics of neural networks. In this paper, we examine how exponential symmetries -- a broad subclass of continuous symmetries present in the model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Liu Ziyin , Mingze Wang , Hongchao Li , Lei Wu

For infinitesimal learning rates, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) follows the path of gradient flow on the full batch loss function. However moderately large learning rates can achieve higher test accuracies, and this generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-29 Samuel L. Smith , Benoit Dherin , David G. T. Barrett , Soham De

In overparameterized logistic regression, gradient descent (GD) iterates diverge in norm while converging in direction to the maximum $\ell_2$-margin solution -- a phenomenon known as the implicit bias of GD. This work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jingfeng Wu , Peter Bartlett , Matus Telgarsky , Bin Yu

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based training of neural networks with a large learning rate or a small batch-size typically ends in well-generalizing, flat regions of the weight space, as indicated by small eigenvalues of the Hessian of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-24 Stanisław Jastrzębski , Zachary Kenton , Nicolas Ballas , Asja Fischer , Yoshua Bengio , Amos Storkey

We analyze the training dynamics for deep linear networks using a new metric - layer imbalance - which defines the flatness of a solution. We demonstrate that different regularization methods, such as weight decay or noise data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Boris Ginsburg

Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu

Deep neural networks with remarkably strong generalization performances are usually over-parameterized. Despite explicit regularization strategies are used for practitioners to avoid over-fitting, the impacts are often small. Some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Deren Lei , Zichen Sun , Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guy Smorodinsky , Sveta Gimpleson , Itay Safran

We study the complexity of training neural network models with one hidden nonlinear activation layer and an output weighted sum layer. We analyze Gradient Descent applied to learning a bounded target function on $n$ real-valued inputs. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Santosh Vempala , John Wilmes

While significant theoretical progress has been achieved, unveiling the generalization mystery of overparameterized neural networks still remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of shallow neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Yunwen Lei , Rong Jin , Yiming Ying

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Yikai Zhang , Wenjia Zhang , Sammy Bald , Vamsi Pingali , Chao Chen , Mayank Goswami

The training of machine learning models is typically carried out using some form of gradient descent, often with great success. However, non-asymptotic analyses of first-order optimization algorithms typically employ a gradient smoothness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Thomas Flynn

We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Idan Amir , Roi Livni , Nathan Srebro

Recent empirical advances show that training deep models with large learning rate often improves generalization performance. However, theoretical justifications on the benefits of large learning rate are highly limited, due to challenges in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Yuqing Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Molei Tao

It is believed that Gradient Descent (GD) induces an implicit bias towards good generalization in training machine learning models. This paper provides a fine-grained analysis of the dynamics of GD for the matrix sensing problem, whose goal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Jikai Jin , Zhiyuan Li , Kaifeng Lyu , Simon S. Du , Jason D. Lee