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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

The deep learning recipe of casting real-world problems as mathematical optimisation and tackling the optimisation by training deep neural networks using gradient-based optimisation has undoubtedly proven to be a fruitful one. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-24 Mihaela Claudia Rosca

Label noise is a critical factor that degrades the generalization performance of deep neural networks, thus leading to severe issues in real-world problems. Existing studies have employed strategies based on either loss or uncertainty to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Wonyoung Shin , Jung-Woo Ha , Shengzhe Li , Yongwoo Cho , Hoyean Song , Sunyoung Kwon

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) introduces anisotropic noise that is correlated with the local curvature of the loss landscape, thereby biasing optimization toward flat minima. Prior work often assumes an equivalence between the Fisher…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yikuan Zhang , Ning Yang , Yuhai Tu

A recent empirical observation (Li et al., 2022b) of activation sparsity in MLP blocks offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs for free. Although having attributed it to training dynamics, existing theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Ze Peng , Lei Qi , Yinghuan Shi , Yang Gao

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising paradigm for realizing edge intelligence, allowing collaborative learning among distributed edge devices by sharing models instead of raw data. However, the shared models are often assumed to be ideal,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Dongzi Jin , Yong Xiao , Yingyu Li

We design differentially private learning algorithms that are agnostic to the learning model. Our algorithms are interactive in nature, i.e., instead of outputting a model based on the training data, they provide predictions for a set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-15 Raef Bassily , Om Thakkar , Abhradeep Thakurta

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

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

Despite attaining high empirical generalization, the sharpness of models trained with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) do not always correlate with generalization error. Instead of viewing SAM as minimizing sharpness to improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Ankit Vani , Frederick Tung , Gabriel L. Oliveira , Hossein Sharifi-Noghabi

The capacity of deep learning models is often large enough to both learn the underlying statistical signal and overfit to noise in the training set. This noise memorization can be harmful especially for data with a low signal-to-noise ratio…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wei Huang , Andi Han , Yujin Song , Yilan Chen , Denny Wu , Difan Zou , Taiji Suzuki

When training a Neural Network, it is optimized using the available training data with the hope that it generalizes well to new or unseen testing data. At the same absolute value, a flat minimum in the loss landscape is presumed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Nicolas Lell , Ansgar Scherp

In this work, we investigate the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when training a single-neuron autoencoder with linear or ReLU activation on orthogonal data. We show that for this non-convex problem, randomly initialized SGD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-08 Nikhil Ghosh , Spencer Frei , Wooseok Ha , Bin Yu

Recently, flat minima are proven to be effective for improving generalization and sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieves state-of-the-art performance. Yet the current definition of flatness discussed in SAM and its follow-ups are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Xingxuan Zhang , Renzhe Xu , Han Yu , Hao Zou , Peng Cui

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 have been shown to achieve state-of-the-art performance in several machine learning tasks. Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the preferred optimization algorithm for training these networks and asynchronous SGD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-06 Wei Zhang , Suyog Gupta , Xiangru Lian , Ji Liu

Training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with small batches using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) yields superior test performance compared to larger batches. The specific noise structure inherent to SGD is known to be responsible for this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Tom Sander , Maxime Sylvestre , Alain Durmus

Motivated by extreme multi-label classification applications, we consider training deep learning models over sparse data in multi-GPU servers. The variance in the number of non-zero features across training batches and the intrinsic GPU…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-10-15 Yujing Ma , Florin Rusu , Kesheng Wu , Alexander Sim

Sharpness of minima is a promising quantity that can correlate with generalization in deep networks and, when optimized during training, can improve generalization. However, standard sharpness is not invariant under reparametrizations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Maksym Andriushchenko , Francesco Croce , Maximilian Müller , Matthias Hein , Nicolas Flammarion

The largest eigenvalue of the Hessian, or sharpness, of neural networks is a key quantity to understand their optimization dynamics. In this paper, we study the sharpness of deep linear networks for univariate regression. Minimizers can…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Pierre Marion , Lénaïc Chizat