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It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Pan Zhou , Jiashi Feng , Chao Ma , Caiming Xiong , Steven Hoi , Weinan E

Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Harsh Rangwani , Sumukh K Aithal , Mayank Mishra , R. Venkatesh Babu

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-07 Brian Swenson , Ryan Murray , H. Vincent Poor , Soummya Kar

When simulating multiscale stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in high-dimensions, separation of timescales, stochastic noise and high-dimensionality can make simulations prohibitively expensive. The computational cost is dictated by…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2015-10-13 Miles Crosskey , Mauro Maggioni

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

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Vivak Patel

We study the implicit bias of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) when training $L$-layer linear diagonal networks on linearly separable binary classification. For linear models ($L=1$), both $\ell_\infty$- and $\ell_2$-SAM recover the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chaewon Moon , Dongkuk Si , Chulhee Yun

Decentralized training enables learning with distributed datasets generated at different locations without relying on a central server. In realistic scenarios, the data distribution across these sparsely connected learning agents can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sakshi Choudhary , Sai Aparna Aketi , Kaushik Roy

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

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has well documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural networks, even without sizable data augmentation. Embracing the geometry of the loss function, where neighborhoods of 'flat minima'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

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

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is an effective method for improving the generalization of federated learning (FL) by steering local training toward flat minima. Under data heterogeneity, however, device-side SAM searches for locally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Bingnan Xiao , Yuan Gao , Bingcong Li , Wei Ni , Xin Wang , Tony Q. S. Quek

Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization in large-scale model training by linking loss landscape geometry to generalization. However, challenges such as mislabeled noisy data and privacy concerns have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Chenyang Ren , Yifan Jia , Huanyi Xie , Zhaobin Xu , Tianxing Wei , Liangyu Wang , Lijie Hu , Di Wang

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) methods have gained increasing popularity by formulating the problem of minimizing both loss value and loss sharpness as a minimax objective. In this work, we increase the efficiency of the maximization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Gonçalo Mordido , Pranshu Malviya , Aristide Baratin , Sarath Chandar

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is most known for achieving state-of the-art performances on natural image and language tasks. However, its most pronounced improvements (of tens of percent) is rather in the presence of label noise.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Christina Baek , Zico Kolter , Aditi Raghunathan

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization caused by complex and non-convex loss landscapes. One of the popular solutions is Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), which smooths the loss landscape via minimizing the maximized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) was proposed to reduce sharpness of minima and has been shown to enhance generalization performance in various settings. In this work we show that perturbing only the affine normalization parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Maximilian Mueller , Tiffany Vlaar , David Rolnick , Matthias Hein

Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM) has been proposed recently to improve model generalization ability. However, SAM calculates the gradient twice in each optimization step, thereby doubling the computation costs compared to stochastic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Jiaxin Deng , Junbiao Pang , Baochang Zhang , Tian Wang

Classic zeroth-order optimization approaches typically optimize for a smoothed version of the original function, i.e., the expected objective under randomly perturbed model parameters. This can be interpreted as encouraging the loss values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Xuchen Gong , Tian Li

Deep neural networks are often overparameterized and may not easily achieve model generalization. Adversarial training has shown effectiveness in improving generalization by regularizing the change of loss on top of adversarially chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Fangyu Liu , Huan Zhang , Muhao Chen