English
Related papers

Related papers: Flat Minima and Generalization: Insights from Stoc…

200 papers

The paper investigates the fundamental convergence properties of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a recently proposed gradient-based optimization method [Foret et al., 2021] that significantly improves the generalization of deep neural…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-22 Pham Duy Khanh , Hoang-Chau Luong , Boris S. Mordukhovich , Dat Ba Tran

Optimization algorithms that seek flatter minima, such as Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), are credited with improved generalization and robustness to noise. We ask whether such gains impact membership privacy. Surprisingly, we find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Young In Kim , Andrea Agiollo , Pratiksha Agrawal , Johannes O. Royset , Rajiv Khanna

The success of minimax learning problems of generative adversarial networks (GANs) has been observed to depend on the minimax optimization algorithm used for their training. This dependence is commonly attributed to the convergence speed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Farzan Farnia , Asuman Ozdaglar

It is commonly believed that gradient compression in federated learning (FL) enjoys significant improvement in communication efficiency with negligible performance degradation. In this paper, we find that gradient compression induces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Yujie Gu , Richeng Jin , Zhaoyang Zhang , Huaiyu Dai

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a highly effective regularization technique for improving the generalization of deep neural networks for various settings. However, the underlying working of SAM remains elusive because of various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Kaiyue Wen , Tengyu Ma , Zhiyuan Li

It is often observed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants implicitly select a solution with good generalization performance; such implicit bias is often characterized in terms of the sharpness of the minima. Kleinberg et…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-28 Atsushi Nitanda , Ryuhei Kikuchi , Shugo Maeda , Denny Wu

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been demonstrated to improve the generalization performance of overparameterized models by seeking flat minima on the loss landscape through optimizing model parameters that incur the largest loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Tian Li , Tianyi Zhou , Jeffrey A. Bilmes

Flat minima are strongly associated with improved generalisation in deep neural networks. However, this connection has proven nuanced in recent studies, with both theoretical counterexamples and empirical exceptions emerging in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Israel Mason-Williams , Gabryel Mason-Williams , Helen Yannakoudakis

The allure of superhuman-level capabilities has led to considerable interest in language models like GPT-3 and T5, wherein the research has, by and large, revolved around new model architectures, training tasks, and loss objectives, along…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-17 Dara Bahri , Hossein Mobahi , Yi Tay

This work studies the generalization error of gradient methods. More specifically, we focus on how training steps $T$ and step-size $\eta$ might affect generalization in smooth stochastic convex optimization (SCO) problems. We first provide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Peiyuan Zhang , Jiaye Teng , Jingzhao Zhang

Modern deep learning models are over-parameterized, where different optima can result in widely varying generalization performance. The Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) technique modifies the fundamental loss function that steers gradient…

A widely believed explanation for the remarkable generalization capacities of overparameterized neural networks is that the optimization algorithms used for training induce an implicit bias towards benign solutions. To grasp this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Maria Matveev , Vit Fojtik , Hung-Hsu Chou , Gitta Kutyniok , Johannes Maly

Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Toki Tahmid Inan , Mingrui Liu , Amarda Shehu

We study the SAM (Sharpness-Aware Minimization) optimizer which has recently attracted a lot of interest due to its increased performance over more classical variants of stochastic gradient descent. Our main contribution is the derivation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Enea Monzio Compagnoni , Luca Biggio , Antonio Orvieto , Frank Norbert Proske , Hans Kersting , Aurelien Lucchi

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

Many machine learning tasks can be formulated as Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization (R-ERM), and solved by optimization algorithms such as gradient descent (GD), stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and stochastic variance reduction…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-09-28 Qi Meng , Yue Wang , Wei Chen , Taifeng Wang , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

In today's heavily overparameterized models, the value of the training loss provides few guarantees on model generalization ability. Indeed, optimizing only the training loss value, as is commonly done, can easily lead to suboptimal model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Pierre Foret , Ariel Kleiner , Hossein Mobahi , Behnam Neyshabur

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss within a fixed parameter-space radius neighborhood. SAM and its variants mainly rely on a first-order linearized surrogate, while flat minima are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jinping Wang , Qinhan Liu , Zhiwu Xie , Zhiqiang Gao