Related papers: Sharpness-Aware Minimization and the Edge of Stabi…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success across various graph-based tasks but remain highly sensitive to distribution shifts. In this work, we focus on a prevalent yet under-explored phenomenon in graph generalization,…
Deep neural networks trained using gradient descent with a fixed learning rate $\eta$ often operate in the regime of "edge of stability" (EOS), where the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian equilibrates about the stability threshold $2/\eta$.…
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…
Approximate second-order optimization methods often exhibit poorer generalization compared to first-order approaches. In this work, we look into this issue through the lens of the loss landscape and find that existing second-order methods…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) enhances generalization by reducing a Max-Sharpness (MaxS). Despite the practical success, we empirically found that the MAxS behind SAM's generalization enhancements face the "Flatness Indicator Problem"…
The simplicity of gradient descent (GD) made it the default method for training ever-deeper and complex neural networks. Both loss functions and architectures are often explicitly tuned to be amenable to this basic local optimization. In…
Energy-efficient deep neural network (DNN) accelerators are prone to non-idealities that degrade DNN performance at inference time. To mitigate such degradation, existing methods typically add perturbations to the DNN weights during…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance in node classification. However, GNNs perform poorly in the Few-Shot Node Classification (FSNC) task that requires robust generalization to make accurate predictions for unseen…
Sharpness-aware and gradient-alignment methods have been shown to improve generalization, however each family of methods targets a single geometric property of the loss landscape, while ignoring the other. In this paper, we show that this…
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…
The classical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying stepsize $\eta_t = \eta/\sqrt{t}$ relies on well-tuned $\eta$ depending on problem parameters such as Lipschitz smoothness constant, which is often…
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…
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…
The typical training of neural networks using large stepsize gradient descent (GD) under the logistic loss often involves two distinct phases, where the empirical risk oscillates in the first phase but decreases monotonically in the second…
To fully uncover the great potential of deep neural networks (DNNs), various learning algorithms have been developed to improve the model's generalization ability. Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) establishes a generic scheme…
The mechanisms by which certain training interventions, such as increasing learning rates and applying batch normalization, improve the generalization of deep networks remains a mystery. Prior works have speculated that "flatter" solutions…
In this paper we study the stability and its trade-off with optimization error for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms in the pairwise learning setting. Pairwise learning refers to a learning task which involves a loss function…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been demonstrated to improve the generalization performance of overparameterized models by seeking flat minima on the loss landscape through optimizing model parameters that incur the largest loss…
Generalization analyses of deep learning typically assume that the training converges to a fixed point. But, recent results indicate that in practice, the weights of deep neural networks optimized with stochastic gradient descent often…
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…