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Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves model generalization but doubles the computational cost of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) by requiring twice the gradient calculations per optimization step. To mitigate this, we propose…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jiaxin Deng , Junbiao Pang

Recently, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) algorithm has shown state-of-the-art generalization abilities in vision tasks. It demonstrates that flat minima tend to imply better generalization abilities. However, it has some difficulty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhiyuan Zhang , Ruixuan Luo , Qi Su , Xu Sun

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) 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

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

The paper investigates the fundamental convergence properties of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recently proposed gradient-based optimization method [Foret et al., 2021] that significantly improves the generalization of deep neural…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-22 Pham Duy Khanh , Hoang-Chau Luong , Boris S. Mordukhovich , Dat Ba Tran

While Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization in deep neural networks by minimizing both loss and sharpness, it suffers from inefficiency in distributed large-batch training. We present Landscape-Smoothed SAM (LSAM), a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Yunfei Teng , Sixin Zhang

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is widely used to seek flatter minima -- often linked to better generalization. In its standard implementation, SAM updates the current iterate using the loss gradient evaluated at a point perturbed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Chanwoong Park , Uijeong Jang , Ernest K. Ryu , Insoon Yang

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising method to improve generalization by minimizing sharpness, which is known to correlate well with generalization ability. Since the original proposal of SAM, many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Samuel Schapiro , Han Zhao

It is commonly believed that gradient compression in federated learning (FL) enjoys significant improvement in communication efficiency with negligible performance degradation. In this paper, we find that gradient compression induces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yujie Gu , Richeng Jin , Zhaoyang Zhang , Huaiyu Dai

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

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

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

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

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimization technique designed to improve generalization by favoring flatter loss minima. To achieve this, SAM optimizes a modified objective that penalizes sharpness, using computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Nalin Tiwary , Siddarth Aananth