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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

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) enhances generalization by reducing a Max-Sharpness (MaxS). Despite the practical success, we empirically found that the MAxS behind SAM's generalization enhancements face the "Flatness Indicator Problem"…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jiaxin Deng , Junbiao Pang , Baochang Zhang , Qingming Huang

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

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) enhances generalization by minimizing the maximum training loss within a predefined neighborhood around the parameters. However, its practical implementation approximates this as gradient ascent(s)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jianlong Chen , Zhiming Zhou

Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has attracted much attention because of its surprising effectiveness in improving generalization performance. However, compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it is more prone to getting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chengli Tan , Jiangshe Zhang , Junmin Liu , Yicheng Wang , Yunda Hao

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) encourages flat minima by perturbing parameters along directions of high loss curvature, but treats all parameter directions uniformly, ignoring the underlying loss geometry. We introduce LLQR+SAM, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Simon Dufort-Labbé , Mehrab Hamidi , Razvan Pascanu , Ioannis Mitliagkas , Damien Scieur , Aristide Baratin

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

The sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) algorithm and its variants, including gap guided SAM (GSAM), have been successful at improving the generalization capability of deep neural network models by finding flat local minima of the empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Hinata Harada , Hideaki Iiduka

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) has well documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural networks, even without sizable data augmentation. Embracing the geometry of the loss function, where neighborhoods of 'flat minima'…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

Recently, there has been a surge in interest in developing optimization algorithms for overparameterized models as achieving generalization is believed to require algorithms with suitable biases. This interest centers on minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Behrooz Tahmasebi , Ashkan Soleymani , Dara Bahri , Stefanie Jegelka , Patrick Jaillet

Fine-tuning large pretrained language models on a limited training corpus usually suffers from poor generalization. Prior works show that the recently-proposed sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization method can improve the model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Qihuang Zhong , Liang Ding , Li Shen , Peng Mi , Juhua Liu , Bo Du , Dacheng Tao

Effective clinical deployment of deep learning models in healthcare demands high generalization performance to ensure accurate diagnosis and treatment planning. In recent years, significant research has focused on improving the…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-22 Mohamed Hassan , Aleksandar Vakanski , Min Xian

Neural networks trained by empirical risk minimization often suffer from overfitting, especially to specific samples or domains, which leads to poor generalization. Curriculum Learning (CL) addresses this issue by selecting training samples…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Hiroaki Aizawa , Yoshikazu Hayashi

The recently proposed Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing a \textit{perturbed loss} defined as the maximum loss within a neighborhood in the parameter space. However, we show that both sharp and flat…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Juntang Zhuang , Boqing Gong , Liangzhe Yuan , Yin Cui , Hartwig Adam , Nicha Dvornek , Sekhar Tatikonda , James Duncan , Ting Liu

Fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained models with limited data presents significant challenges for generalization. While Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has proven effective in improving generalization by seeking flat minima, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuhang Liu , Tao Li , Zhehao Huang , Zuopeng Yang , Xiaolin Huang

Recently, flat-minima optimizers, which seek to find parameters in low-loss neighborhoods, have been shown to improve a neural network's generalization performance over stochastic and adaptive gradient-based optimizers. Two methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-30 Jean Kaddour , Linqing Liu , Ricardo Silva , Matt J. Kusner

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed method that minimizes the sharpness of the training loss of a neural network. While its generalization improvement is well-known and is the primary motivation, we uncover an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Maksym Andriushchenko , Dara Bahri , Hossein Mobahi , Nicolas Flammarion

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an effective method for improving generalization ability by regularizing loss sharpness. In this paper, we explore SAM in the context of adversarial robustness. We find that using only SAM can achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Zeming Wei , Jingyu Zhu , Yihao Zhang