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Deep models often fail to generalize well in test domains when the data distribution differs from that in the training domain. Among numerous approaches to address this Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization problem, there has been a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Qixun Wang , Yifei Wang , Hong Zhu , Yisen Wang

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

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) has emerged as a highly effective technique to improve model generalization, but its underlying principles are not fully understood. We investigate m-sharpness, where SAM performance improves monotonically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Haocheng Luo , Mehrtash Harandi , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

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

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

Despite the popularity of the Adam optimizer in practice, most theoretical analyses study Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as a proxy for Adam, and little is known about how the solutions found by Adam differ. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Xinghan Li , Haodong Wen , Kaifeng Lyu

In multimodal learning, dominant modalities often overshadow others, limiting generalization. We propose Modality-Aware Sharpness-Aware Minimization (M-SAM), a model-agnostic framework that applies to many modalities and supports early and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Hossein R. Nowdeh , Jie Ji , Xiaolong Ma , Fatemeh Afghah

Recent studies on deep neural networks show that flat minima of the loss landscape correlate with improved generalization. Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) efficiently finds flat regions by updating the parameters according to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Albert Kjøller Jacobsen , Georgios Arvanitidis

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

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has been instrumental in improving deep neural network training by minimizing both the training loss and the sharpness of the loss landscape, leading the model into flatter minima that are associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Van-Anh Nguyen , Quyen Tran , Tuan Truong , Thanh-Toan Do , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

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

The objective of domain generalization (DG) is to enhance the transferability of the model learned from a source domain to unobserved domains. To prevent overfitting to a specific domain, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) reduces source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-13 Seungjae Shin , HeeSun Bae , Byeonghu Na , Yoon-Yeong Kim , Il-Chul Moon

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Tianshuo Xu , Xiaoshuai Sun , Tongliang Liu , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization caused by complex and non-convex loss landscapes. One of the popular solutions is Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), which smooths the loss landscape via minimizing the maximized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

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) 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

Deep neural networks are often overparameterized and may not easily achieve model generalization. Adversarial training has shown effectiveness in improving generalization by regularizing the change of loss on top of adversarially chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Wenxuan Zhou , Fangyu Liu , Huan Zhang , Muhao Chen

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-07 Philip M. Long , Peter L. Bartlett