English
Related papers

Related papers: Training Instabilities Induce Flatness Bias in Gra…

200 papers

Existing analyses of neural network training often operate under the unrealistic assumption of an extremely small learning rate. This lies in stark contrast to practical wisdom and empirical studies, such as the work of J. Cohen et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Kwangjun Ahn , Sébastien Bubeck , Sinho Chewi , Yin Tat Lee , Felipe Suarez , Yi Zhang

In this work, we investigate a particular implicit bias in gradient descent training, which we term "Feature Averaging," and argue that it is one of the principal factors contributing to the non-robustness of deep neural networks. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Binghui Li , Zhixuan Pan , Kaifeng Lyu , Jian Li

Understanding the training dynamics of deep neural networks is challenging due to their high-dimensional nature and intricate loss landscapes. Recent studies have revealed that, along the training trajectory, the gradient approximately…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Minhak Song , Kwangjun Ahn , Chulhee Yun

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used algorithm in deep-learning neural networks has attracted continuing studies for the theoretical principles behind its success. A recent work reports an anomaly (inverse) relation between the…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2023-08-16 Xia Xiong , Yong-Cong Chen , Chunxiao Shi , Ping Ao

It is known that training deep neural networks, in particular, deep convolutional networks, with aggressively reduced numerical precision is challenging. The stochastic gradient descent algorithm becomes unstable in the presence of noisy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-11 Darryl D. Lin , Sachin S. Talathi

Normalization layers (e.g., Batch Normalization, Layer Normalization) were introduced to help with optimization difficulties in very deep nets, but they clearly also help generalization, even in not-so-deep nets. Motivated by the long-held…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjeev Arora

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

We show that in a variety of large-scale deep learning scenarios the gradient dynamically converges to a very small subspace after a short period of training. The subspace is spanned by a few top eigenvectors of the Hessian (equal to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Guy Gur-Ari , Daniel A. Roberts , Ethan Dyer

We conjecture that the inherent difference in generalisation between adaptive and non-adaptive gradient methods in deep learning stems from the increased estimation noise in the flattest directions of the true loss surface. We demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-17 Diego Granziol , Nicholas Baskerville

We systematically analyze optimization dynamics in deep neural networks (DNNs) trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study the effect of learning rate $\eta$, depth $d$, and width $w$ of the neural network. By analyzing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Dayal Singh Kalra , Maissam Barkeshli

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Scott Pesme , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Even for the gradient descent (GD) method applied to neural network training, understanding its optimization dynamics, including convergence rate, iterate trajectories, function value oscillations, and especially its implicit acceleration,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Alexander Tyurin

Very little is known about the training dynamics of adaptive gradient methods like Adam in deep learning. In this paper, we shed light on the behavior of these algorithms in the full-batch and sufficiently large batch settings.…

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland

During neural network training, the sharpness of the Hessian matrix of the training loss rises until training is on the edge of stability. As a result, even nonstochastic gradient descent does not accurately model the underlying dynamical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Mark Lowell , Catharine Kastner

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

Recent advances in deep learning optimization have unveiled two intriguing phenomena under large learning rates: Edge of Stability (EoS) and Progressive Sharpening (PS), challenging classical Gradient Descent (GD) analyses. Current research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Liming Liu , Zixuan Zhang , Simon Du , Tuo Zhao

Recent work has highlighted a surprising alignment between gradients and the top eigenspace of the Hessian -- termed the Dominant subspace -- during neural network training. Concurrently, there has been growing interest in the distinct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Daniyar Zakarin , Sidak Pal Singh

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-17 Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto

Deep neural networks trained using gradient descent with a fixed learning rate $\eta$ often operate in the regime of "edge of stability" (EOS), where the largest eigenvalue of the Hessian equilibrates about the stability threshold $2/\eta$.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-03 Avrajit Ghosh , Soo Min Kwon , Rongrong Wang , Saiprasad Ravishankar , Qing Qu