English
Related papers

Related papers: Sharpness-Aware Minimization and the Edge of Stabi…

200 papers

The Edge of Stability (EoS) is a phenomenon where the sharpness (largest eigenvalue) of the Hessian approaches and then hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$ during gradient descent (GD) with step size $\eta$. Despite (apparently)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Rustem Islamov , Michael Crawshaw , Jeremy Cohen , Robert Gower

In this paper, we study the implicit regularization of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) through the lens of {\em dynamical stability} (Wu et al., 2018). We start by revising existing stability analyses of SGD, showing how the Frobenius…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-02 Lei Wu , Weijie J. Su

Understanding the dynamics of optimization in deep learning is increasingly important as models scale. While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants reliably find solutions that generalize well, the mechanisms driving this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Wei-Kai Chang , Rajiv Khanna

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

Full-batch gradient descent on neural networks drives the largest Hessian eigenvalue to the threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. This phenomenon, the Edge of Stability, has resisted a unified explanation: existing accounts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Elon Litman

The sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) algorithm and its variants, including gap guided SAM (GSAM), have been successful at improving the generalization capability of deep neural network models by finding flat local minima of the empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Hinata Harada , Hideaki Iiduka

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has received increasing attention in computer vision since it can effectively eliminate the sharp local minima from the training trajectory and mitigate generalization degradation. However, SAM requires…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Yili Wang , Kaixiong Zhou , Ninghao Liu , Ying Wang , Xin Wang

Modern deep learning models are over-parameterized, where the optimization setup strongly affects the generalization performance. A key element of reliable optimization for these systems is the modification of the loss function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Kayhan Behdin , Qingquan Song , Aman Gupta , David Durfee , Ayan Acharya , Sathiya Keerthi , Rahul Mazumder

A widely believed explanation for the remarkable generalization capacities of overparameterized neural networks is that the optimization algorithms used for training induce an implicit bias towards benign solutions. To grasp this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Maria Matveev , Vit Fojtik , Hung-Hsu Chou , Gitta Kutyniok , Johannes Maly

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has recently emerged as a robust technique for improving the accuracy of deep neural networks. However, SAM incurs a high computational cost in practice, requiring up to twice as much computation as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Renkun Ni , Ping-yeh Chiang , Jonas Geiping , Micah Goldblum , Andrew Gordon Wilson , Tom Goldstein

The capacity to generalize to future unseen data stands as one of the utmost crucial attributes of deep neural networks. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) aims to enhance the generalizability by minimizing worst-case loss using one-step…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Tao Wu , Tie Luo , Donald C. Wunsch

In gradient descent dynamics of neural networks, the top eigenvalue of the loss Hessian (sharpness) displays a variety of robust phenomena throughout training. This includes early time regimes where the sharpness may decrease during early…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Dayal Singh Kalra , Tianyu He , Maissam Barkeshli

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising alternative optimizer to stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The originally-proposed motivation behind SAM was to bias neural networks towards flatter minima that are believed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Jacob Mitchell Springer , Vaishnavh Nagarajan , Aditi Raghunathan

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

In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Pierre Foret , Ariel Kleiner , Hossein Mobahi , Behnam Neyshabur

Cohen et al. (2021) empirically study the evolution of the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, also known as sharpness, along the gradient descent (GD) trajectory and observe the Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon. The sharpness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Minhak Song , Chulhee Yun

We analyze the landscape and training dynamics of diagonal linear networks in a linear regression task, with the network parameters being perturbed by small isotropic normal noise. The addition of such noise may be interpreted as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Gabriel Clara , Sophie Langer , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Classical analyses of gradient descent (GD) define a stability threshold based on the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, often termed sharpness. When the learning rate lies below this threshold, training is stable and the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Lawrence Wang , Stephen J. Roberts

Empirically, modern deep learning training often occurs at the Edge of Stability (EoS), where the sharpness of the loss exceeds the threshold below which classical convergence analysis applies. Despite recent progress, existing theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Eric Gan