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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

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

Learning from Noisy Labels (LNL) remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning because real-world datasets often contain corrupted annotations. Most existing methods rely on label correction or sample selection mechanisms. In contrast,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jiayu Xu , Junbiao Pang

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

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

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has proven highly effective in improving model generalization in machine learning tasks. However, SAM employs a fixed hyperparameter associated with the regularization to characterize the sharpness of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Jinping Zou , Xiaoge Deng , Tao Sun

Network quantization is a dominant paradigm of model compression. However, the abrupt changes in quantized weights during training often lead to severe loss fluctuations and result in a sharp loss landscape, making the gradients unstable…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-22 Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai , Bohan Zhuang

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performances but are typically over-parameterized. The over-parameterization may result in undesirably large generalization error in the absence of other customized training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Jiawei Du , Daquan Zhou , Jiashi Feng , Vincent Y. F. Tan , Joey Tianyi Zhou

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) aims to improve the generalisation of gradient-based learning by seeking out flat minima. In this work, we establish connections between SAM and Mean-Field Variational Inference (MFVI) of neural network…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-20 Szilvia Ujváry , Zsigmond Telek , Anna Kerekes , Anna Mészáros , Ferenc Huszár

Modern deep learning models are over-parameterized, where different optima can result in widely varying generalization performance. The Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) technique modifies the fundamental loss function that steers gradient…

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has well-documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural network models. Accounting for sharpness in the loss function geometry, where neighborhoods of `flat minima' heighten generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Bingcong Li , Yilang Zhang , Georgios B. Giannakis

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

Regression is fundamental in computer vision and is widely used in various tasks including age estimation, depth estimation, target localization, \etc However, real-world data often exhibits imbalanced distribution, making regression models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Yahao Liu , Qin Wang , Lixin Duan , Wen Li

Bilevel optimization problems, which are problems where two optimization problems are nested, have more and more applications in machine learning. In many practical cases, the upper and the lower objectives correspond to empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-03 Mathieu Dagréou , Thomas Moreau , Samuel Vaiter , Pierre Ablin

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) was recently introduced as a regularization procedure for training deep neural networks. It simultaneously minimizes the fitness (or loss) function and the so-called fitness sharpness. The latter serves as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-20 Illya Bakurov , Nathan Haut , Wolfgang Banzhaf

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

The Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) optimization algorithm has been shown to control large eigenvalues of the loss Hessian and provide generalization benefits in a variety of settings. The original motivation for SAM was a modified loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Atish Agarwala , Yann N. Dauphin

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) improves generalization of various deep learning tasks. Motivated by popular architectures such as LoRA, we explore the implicit regularization of SAM for scale-invariant problems involving two groups of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Bingcong Li , Liang Zhang , Niao He