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In this note, we consider appropriately regularized $\ell_2-$empirical risk of depth $2$ nets with any number of gates and show bounds on how the empirical loss evolves for SGD iterates on it -- for arbitrary data and if the activation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Pulkit Gopalani , Anirbit Mukherjee

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

Neural networks that land in flat regions of the loss landscape tend to generalise better than those in sharp regions. Sharpness-Aware Minimisation exploits this to improve generalisation. But function-preserving reparameterisation can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Michael Timothy Bennett

We consider a one-hidden-layer leaky ReLU network of arbitrary width trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) following an arbitrary initialization. We prove that SGD produces neural networks that have classification accuracy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Spencer Frei , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

We investigate the ability of deep neural networks to identify the support of the target function. Our findings reveal that mini-batch SGD effectively learns the support in the first layer of the network by shrinking to zero the weights…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Andrea Pinto , Tomaso Poggio

We study the connection between the highly non-convex loss function of a simple model of the fully-connected feed-forward neural network and the Hamiltonian of the spherical spin-glass model under the assumptions of: i) variable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-01-23 Anna Choromanska , Mikael Henaff , Michael Mathieu , Gérard Ben Arous , Yann LeCun

Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Kaiyue Wen , Zhiyuan Li , Tengyu Ma

Random label noises (or observational noises) widely exist in practical machine learning settings. While previous studies primarily focus on the affects of label noises to the performance of learning, our work intends to investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Haoyi Xiong , Xuhong Li , Boyang Yu , Zhanxing Zhu , Dongrui Wu , Dejing Dou

The largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, or sharpness, of neural networks is a key quantity to understand their optimization dynamics. In this paper, we study the sharpness of deep linear networks for univariate regression. Minimizers can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Pierre Marion , Lénaïc Chizat

The theory of training deep networks has become a central question of modern machine learning and has inspired many practical advancements. In particular, the gradient descent (GD) optimization algorithm has been extensively studied in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-29 Alexandru Crăciun , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

Neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent exhibit an inductive bias towards simpler decision boundaries, typically converging to a narrow family of functions, and often fail to capture more complex features. This phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Rahul Vashisht , P. Krishna Kumar , Harsha Vardhan Govind , Harish G. Ramaswamy

When training deep neural networks with gradient descent, sharpness often increases -- a phenomenon known as progressive sharpening -- before saturating at the edge of stability. Although commonly observed in practice, the underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Geonhui Yoo , Minhak Song , Chulhee Yun

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent training method that relies on worst-case weight perturbations which significantly improves generalization in various settings. We argue that the existing justifications for the success of SAM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Maksym Andriushchenko , Nicolas Flammarion

We perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Preetum Nakkiran , Gal Kaplun , Dimitris Kalimeris , Tristan Yang , Benjamin L. Edelman , Fred Zhang , Boaz Barak

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent optimization framework aiming to improve the deep neural network generalization, through obtaining flatter (i.e. less sharp) solutions. As SAM has been numerically successful, recent papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-22 Kayhan Behdin , Rahul Mazumder

The loss landscapes of neural networks contain minima and saddle points that may be connected in flat regions or appear in isolation. We identify and characterize a special structure in the loss landscape: channels along which the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Flavio Martinelli , Alexander Van Meegen , Berfin Şimşek , Wulfram Gerstner , Johanni Brea

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Carlo Baldassi , Fabrizio Pittorino , Riccardo Zecchina

Deep Neural Networks are known to be brittle to even minor distribution shifts compared to the training distribution. While one line of work has demonstrated that Simplicity Bias (SB) of DNNs - bias towards learning only the simplest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-05 Sravanti Addepalli , Anshul Nasery , R. Venkatesh Babu , Praneeth Netrapalli , Prateek Jain

The phenomenon of implicit regularization has attracted interest in recent years as a fundamental aspect of the remarkable generalizing ability of neural networks. In a nutshell, it entails that gradient descent dynamics in many neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Hong T. M. Chu , Subhro Ghosh , Chi Thanh Lam , Soumendu Sundar Mukherjee

This paper proposes a new optimization algorithm called Entropy-SGD for training deep neural networks that is motivated by the local geometry of the energy landscape. Local extrema with low generalization error have a large proportion of…