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Flatness of the loss landscape has been widely studied as an important perspective for understanding the behavior and generalization of deep learning algorithms. Motivated by this view, we propose Flatness-Aware Stochastic Gradient Langevin…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Stefano Bruno , Youngsik Hwang , Jaehyeon An , Sotirios Sabanis , Dong-Young Lim

Label smoothing (LS) is an arising learning paradigm that uses the positively weighted average of both the hard training labels and uniformly distributed soft labels. It was shown that LS serves as a regularizer for training data with hard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Jiaheng Wei , Hangyu Liu , Tongliang Liu , Gang Niu , Masashi Sugiyama , Yang Liu

Despite the non-convex nature of their loss functions, deep neural networks are known to generalize well when optimized with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recent work conjectures that SGD with proper configuration is able to find wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-09 Haowei He , Gao Huang , Yang Yuan

Classical analyses of gradient descent (GD) define a stability threshold based on the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, often termed sharpness. When the learning rate lies below this threshold, training is stable and the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Lawrence Wang , Stephen J. Roberts

Regularization is essential for avoiding over-fitting to training data in network optimization, leading to better generalization of the trained networks. The label noise provides a strong implicit regularization by replacing the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Kensuke Nakamura , Bong-Soo Sohn , Kyoung-Jae Won , Byung-Woo Hong

Models are expected to engage in invariance learning, which involves distinguishing the core relations that remain consistent across varying environments to ensure the predictions are safe, robust and fair. While existing works consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Yang Xu , Yihong Gu , Cong Fang

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

Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Kaiyue Wen , Zhiyuan Li , Tengyu Ma

We investigate the stationary (late-time) training regime of single- and two-layer underparameterized linear neural networks within the continuum limit of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for synthetic Gaussian data. In the case of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Markus Gross , Arne P. Raulf , Christoph Räth

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-11 Zhanxing Zhu , Jingfeng Wu , Bing Yu , Lei Wu , Jinwen Ma

Despite their empirical success, neural networks remain vulnerable to small, adversarial perturbations. A longstanding hypothesis suggests that flat minima, regions of low curvature in the loss landscape, offer increased robustness. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Nils Philipp Walter , Linara Adilova , Jilles Vreeken , Michael Kamp

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-04 Xiaowu Dai , Yuhua Zhu

Neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent exhibit an inductive bias towards simpler decision boundaries, typically converging to a narrow family of functions, and often fail to capture more complex features. This phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Rahul Vashisht , P. Krishna Kumar , Harsha Vardhan Govind , Harish G. Ramaswamy

The intuition that local flatness of the loss landscape is correlated with better generalization for deep neural networks (DNNs) has been explored for decades, spawning many different flatness measures. Recently, this link with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-22 Shuofeng Zhang , Isaac Reid , Guillermo Valle Pérez , Ard Louis

Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianneng Yu , Alexandre V. Morozov

Deep unfolding networks have recently gained popularity in the context of solving imaging inverse problems. However, the computational and memory complexity of data-consistency layers within traditional deep unfolding networks scales with…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-06-04 Jiaming Liu , Yu Sun , Weijie Gan , Xiaojian Xu , Brendt Wohlberg , Ulugbek S. Kamilov

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Vivak Patel

Learning to compare two objects are essential in applications, such as digital forensics, face recognition, and brain network analysis, especially when labeled data is scarce and imbalanced. As these applications make high-stake decisions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Chao Chen , Yifan Shen , Guixiang Ma , Xiangnan Kong , Srinivas Rangarajan , Xi Zhang , Sihong Xie

Sharpness-aware and gradient-alignment methods have been shown to improve generalization, however each family of methods targets a single geometric property of the loss landscape, while ignoring the other. In this paper, we show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Aristotelis Ballas , Christos Diou

In this work, we investigate the mechanism underlying loss spikes observed during neural network training. When the training enters a region with a lower-loss-as-sharper (LLAS) structure, the training becomes unstable, and the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Xiaolong Li , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Zhongwang Zhang