Related papers: How Muon's Spectral Design Benefits Generalization…
Gradient orthogonalization is a simple strategy that shows great utility in speeding up gradient descent. The Muon optimizer (Jordan, Jin, et al., 2024) combines gradient orthogonalization with first-order momentum and achieves significant…
Optimization methods play a central role in signal processing, serving as the mathematical foundation for inference, estimation, and control. While classical iterative optimization algorithms provide interpretability and theoretical…
With the expansion of data availability, machine learning (ML) has achieved remarkable breakthroughs in both academia and industry. However, imbalanced data distributions are prevalent in various types of raw data and severely hinder the…
Generalization of models to out-of-distribution (OOD) data has captured tremendous attention recently. Specifically, compositional generalization, i.e., whether a model generalizes to new structures built of components observed during…
Despite remarkable success in a variety of applications, it is well-known that deep learning can fail catastrophically when presented with out-of-distribution data. Toward addressing this challenge, we consider the domain generalization…
Multi-modal learning aims to enhance performance by unifying models from various modalities but often faces the "modality imbalance" problem in real data, leading to a bias towards dominant modalities and neglecting others, thereby limiting…
While significant theoretical progress has been achieved, unveiling the generalization mystery of overparameterized neural networks still remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of shallow neural…
Muon orthogonalizes matrix updates, but multi-head attention naturally operates at the level of heads. This granularity mismatch raises the question of whether Muon should be applied to the full attention projection, to individual heads, or…
Supervised deep learning models require significant amount of labeled data to achieve an acceptable performance on a specific task. However, when tested on unseen data, the models may not perform well. Therefore, the models need to be…
Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the representation of a node by aggregating its neighbors, have become an effective computational tool in downstream applications. Over-smoothing is one of the key issues which limit the performance…
Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…
The graph neural network (GNN) has demonstrated its superior performance in various applications. The working mechanism behind it, however, remains mysterious. GNN models are designed to learn effective representations for graph-structured…
Over the past decades, researchers and ML practitioners have come up with better and better ways to build, understand and improve the quality of ML models, but mostly under the key assumption that the training data is distributed…
Many current neural networks for medical imaging generalise poorly to data unseen during training. Such behaviour can be caused by networks overfitting easy-to-learn, or statistically dominant, features while disregarding other potentially…
Real-world datasets are inherently heterogeneous, yet how per-class structural differences and sampling imbalance shape the training dynamics of diffusion models-and potentially exacerbate disparities-remains poorly understood. While models…
Domain generalization (DG) aims to incorporate knowledge from multiple source domains into a single model that could generalize well on unseen target domains. This problem is ubiquitous in practice since the distributions of the target data…
Understanding and accurately following instructions is critical for large language models (LLMs) to be effective across diverse tasks. In this work, we rigorously examine the key factors that enable models to generalize to unseen…
Muon is a matrix-aware optimizer that leverages Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to enforce spectral gradient orthogonalization by driving all singular values of the momentum matrix toward 1. While this uniform spectral whitening enhances…
Finetuning pretrained models occurs in a low-dimensional subspace of the full parameter space. Prior work has focused on characterizing this optimization subspace, but largely ignored the complementary question: why do certain directions…
Equivariant neural networks encode geometric symmetries by construction, yet they are often difficult to optimize and can underperform less constrained architectures. A growing body of work addresses this through architectural modifications…