English
Related papers

Related papers: Normalization Layers Are All That Sharpness-Aware …

200 papers

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is known to improve the generalization performance of neural networks. However, it is not widely used in real-world applications yet due to its expensive model perturbation cost. A few variants of SAM have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Sunwoo Lee

Recently, flat minima are proven to be effective for improving generalization and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves state-of-the-art performance. Yet the current definition of flatness discussed in SAM and its follow-ups are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Xingxuan Zhang , Renzhe Xu , Han Yu , Hao Zou , Peng Cui

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

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

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

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) was introduced to improve generalization by seeking flat minima, yet it also exhibits robustness to label noise, a phenomenon that remains only partially understood. Prior work has mainly attributed this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hoang-Chau Luong , Quang-Thuc Nguyen , Dat Ba Tran , Minh-Triet Tran

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has substantially improved the generalization of neural networks under various settings. Despite the success, its effectiveness remains poorly understood. In this work, we discover an intriguing phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Zhanpeng Zhou , Mingze Wang , Yuchen Mao , Bingrui Li , Junchi Yan

Recently, learning algorithms motivated from sharpness of loss surface as an effective measure of generalization gap have shown state-of-the-art performances. Nevertheless, sharpness defined in a rigid region with a fixed radius, has a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Jungmin Kwon , Jeongseop Kim , Hyunseo Park , In Kwon Choi

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a highly effective technique to improve model generalization, but its underlying principles are not fully understood. We investigate m-sharpness, where SAM performance improves monotonically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Haocheng Luo , Mehrtash Harandi , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has been shown to improve the generalization of neural networks. However, each SAM update requires \emph{sequentially} computing two gradients, effectively doubling the per-iteration cost compared to base…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Wanyun Xie , Thomas Pethick , Volkan Cevher

We characterize the effectiveness of Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) under machine unlearning scheme, where unlearning forget signals interferes with learning retain signals. While previous work prove that SAM improves generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Haoran Tang , Rajiv Khanna

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) aims to improve generalization by minimizing a worst-case perturbed loss over a small neighborhood of model parameters. However, during training, its optimization behavior does not always align with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Hongru Duan , Yongle Chen , Lei Guan

Despite attaining high empirical generalization, the sharpness of models trained with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) do not always correlate with generalization error. Instead of viewing SAM as minimizing sharpness to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Ankit Vani , Frederick Tung , Gabriel L. Oliveira , Hossein Sharifi-Noghabi

The generalization performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) is a critical factor in achieving robust model behavior on unseen data. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of sharpness-based measures in promoting generalization by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Mohamed Hassan , Aleksandar Vakanski , Boyu Zhang , Min Xian

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

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM), which searches for flat minima by min-max optimization, has been shown to be useful in improving model generalization. However, since each SAM update requires computing two gradients, its computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Weisen Jiang , Hansi Yang , Yu Zhang , James Kwok

The recently proposed optimization algorithm for deep neural networks Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) suggests perturbing parameters before gradient calculation by a gradient ascent step to guide the optimization into parameter space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Marlon Becker , Frederick Altrock , Benjamin Risse

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in developing optimization algorithms for overparameterized models as achieving generalization is believed to require algorithms with suitable biases. This interest centers on minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Behrooz Tahmasebi , Ashkan Soleymani , Dara Bahri , Stefanie Jegelka , Patrick Jaillet

We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a gradient-based optimization method for deep networks that has exhibited performance improvements on image and language prediction problems. We show that when SAM is applied with a convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Peter L. Bartlett , Philip M. Long , Olivier Bousquet

Recent studies on deep neural networks show that flat minima of the loss landscape correlate with improved generalization. Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) efficiently finds flat regions by updating the parameters according to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Albert Kjøller Jacobsen , Georgios Arvanitidis