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Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

Scaling limits, such as infinite-width limits, serve as promising theoretical tools to study large-scale models. However, it is widely believed that existing infinite-width theory does not faithfully explain the behavior of practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Moritz Haas , Sebastian Bordt , Ulrike von Luxburg , Leena Chennuru Vankadara

Regularizing the input gradient has shown to be effective in promoting the robustness of neural networks. The regularization of the input's Hessian is therefore a natural next step. A key challenge here is the computational complexity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Waleed Mustafa , Robert A. Vandermeulen , Marius Kloft

Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Peter Henderson , Joshua Romoff , Joelle Pineau

In adversarial machine learning, deep neural networks can fit the adversarial examples on the training dataset but have poor generalization ability on the test set. This phenomenon is called robust overfitting, and it can be observed when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Jiancong Xiao , Yanbo Fan , Ruoyu Sun , Jue Wang , Zhi-Quan Luo

We show that parametric models trained by a stochastic gradient method (SGM) with few iterations have vanishing generalization error. We prove our results by arguing that SGM is algorithmically stable in the sense of Bousquet and Elisseeff.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Moritz Hardt , Benjamin Recht , Yoram Singer

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ning Yang , Yikuan Zhang , Qi Ouyang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu

Deep learning models can reveal sensitive information about individual training examples, and while differential privacy (DP) provides guarantees restricting such leakage, it also alters optimization dynamics in poorly understood ways. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ayana Hussain , Ricky Fang

In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Feng Chen , Daniel Kunin , Atsushi Yamamura , Surya Ganguli

Why do deep networks generalize well? In contrast to classical generalization theory, we approach this fundamental question by examining not only inputs and outputs, but the evolution of internal features. Our study suggests a phenomenon of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Tianyu Ruan , Kuo Gai , Shihua Zhang

Deep neural networks achieve stellar generalisation even when they have enough parameters to easily fit all their training data. We study this phenomenon by analysing the dynamics and the performance of over-parameterised two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Sebastian Goldt , Madhu S. Advani , Andrew M. Saxe , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

The generalization mystery in deep learning is the following: Why do over-parameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent (GD) generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random datasets of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-07 Satrajit Chatterjee , Piotr Zielinski

Recent research in neural networks and machine learning suggests that using many more parameters than strictly required by the initial complexity of a regression problem can result in more accurate or faster-converging models -- contrary to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Arthur Castello B. de Oliveira , Milad Siami , Eduardo D. Sontag

Deep reinforcement learning systems often suffer from unstable training dynamics due to non-stationarity, where learning objectives and data distributions evolve over time. We show that under non-stationary targets, isotropic Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Ali Saheb Pasand , Johan Obando-Ceron , Aaron Courville , Pouya Bashivan , Pablo Samuel Castro

We employ constraints to control the parameter space of deep neural networks throughout training. The use of customized, appropriately designed constraints can reduce the vanishing/exploding gradients problem, improve smoothness of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Benedict Leimkuhler , Tiffany Vlaar , Timothée Pouchon , Amos Storkey

We analyze the landscape and training dynamics of diagonal linear networks in a linear regression task, with the network parameters being perturbed by small isotropic normal noise. The addition of such noise may be interpreted as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Gabriel Clara , Sophie Langer , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Si Yi Meng , Baptiste Goujaud , Antonio Orvieto , Christopher De Sa

Deep neural network training often exhibits highly anisotropic loss geometry, where a few sharp dominant Hessian directions coexist with a large flatter bulk. Gradients tend to align disproportionately with these dominant directions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Tolga Dimlioglu , Kristi Topollai , Anna Choromanska

Understanding the advantages of deep neural networks trained by gradient descent (GD) compared to shallow models remains an open theoretical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a class of target functions (single and multi-index Gaussian…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-17 Yatin Dandi , Luca Pesce , Lenka Zdeborová , Florent Krzakala

One of the most important parts of Artificial Neural Networks is minimizing the loss functions which tells us how good or bad our model is. To minimize these losses we need to tune the weights and biases. Also to calculate the minimum value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-08 Kaustubh Yadav