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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 mechanisms by which certain training interventions, such as increasing learning rates and applying batch normalization, improve the generalization of deep networks remains a mystery. Prior works have speculated that "flatter" solutions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-25 Simran Kaur , Jeremy Cohen , Zachary C. Lipton

Flat minima, known to enhance generalization and robustness in supervised learning, remain largely unexplored in generative models. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of loss surface flatness in generative models, both…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Taehwan Lee , Kyeongkook Seo , Jaejun Yoo , Sung Whan Yoon

Recent works on over-parameterized neural networks have shown that the stochasticity in optimizers has the implicit regularization effect of minimizing the sharpness of the loss function (in particular, the trace of its Hessian) over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Khashayar Gatmiry , Zhiyuan Li , Ching-Yao Chuang , Sashank Reddi , Tengyu Ma , Stefanie Jegelka

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

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) enhances generalization by reducing a Max-Sharpness (MaxS). Despite the practical success, we empirically found that the MAxS behind SAM's generalization enhancements face the "Flatness Indicator Problem"…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Jiaxin Deng , Junbiao Pang , Baochang Zhang , Qingming Huang

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

Training neural networks involves finding minima of a high-dimensional non-convex loss function. Knowledge of the structure of this energy landscape is sparse. Relaxing from linear interpolations, we construct continuous paths between…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-25 Felix Draxler , Kambis Veschgini , Manfred Salmhofer , Fred A. Hamprecht

Recent studies showed that the generalization of neural networks is correlated with the sharpness of the loss landscape, and flat minima suggests a better generalization ability than sharp minima. In this paper, we propose a novel method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Yuyan Zhou , Ye Li , Lei Feng , Sheng-Jun Huang

Existing generalization measures that aim to capture a model's simplicity based on parameter counts or norms fail to explain generalization in overparameterized deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce a new, theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Lorenz Kuhn , Clare Lyle , Aidan N. Gomez , Jonas Rothfuss , Yarin Gal

Overparameterization is central to the success of deep learning, yet the mechanisms by which it improves optimization remain incompletely understood. We analyze weight-space symmetries in neural networks and show that overparameterization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kusha Sareen , Mohammad Pedramfar , Sékou-Oumar Kaba , Mehran Shakerinava , Siamak Ravanbakhsh

Although modern deep learning often relies on massive over-parameterized models, the fundamental interplay between capacity, sparsity, and robustness in low-capacity networks remains a vital area of study. We introduce a controlled…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Yash Kumar

It is important to understand how the popular regularization method dropout helps the neural network training find a good generalization solution. In this work, we show that the training with dropout finds the neural network with a flatter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Zhongwang Zhang , Hanxu Zhou , Zhi-Qin John Xu

The remarkable generalization ability of neural networks is usually attributed to the implicit bias of SGD, which often yields models with lower complexity using simpler (e.g. linear) and low-rank features. Recent works have provided…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Khashayar Gatmiry , Zhiyuan Li , Sashank J. Reddi , Stefanie Jegelka

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a recent optimization framework aiming to improve the deep neural network generalization, through obtaining flatter (i.e. less sharp) solutions. As SAM has been numerically successful, recent papers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-22 Kayhan Behdin , Rahul Mazumder

Recently, Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) algorithm has shown state-of-the-art generalization abilities in vision tasks. It demonstrates that flat minima tend to imply better generalization abilities. However, it has some difficulty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Zhiyuan Zhang , Ruixuan Luo , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Flatness of the loss curve is conjectured to be connected to the generalization ability of machine learning models, in particular neural networks. While it has been empirically observed that flatness measures consistently correlate strongly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Henning Petzka , Michael Kamp , Linara Adilova , Cristian Sminchisescu , Mario Boley

The success of deep learning has revealed the application potential of neural networks across the sciences and opened up fundamental theoretical problems. In particular, the fact that learning algorithms based on simple variants of gradient…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-02-15 Carlo Baldassi , Clarissa Lauditi , Enrico M. Malatesta , Gabriele Perugini , Riccardo Zecchina

It is widely observed that deep learning models with learned parameters generalize well, even with much more model parameters than the number of training samples. We systematically investigate the underlying reasons why deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Lei Wu , Zhanxing Zhu , Weinan E

Modern deep learning models are over-parameterized, where the optimization setup strongly affects the generalization performance. A key element of reliable optimization for these systems is the modification of the loss function.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-09 Kayhan Behdin , Qingquan Song , Aman Gupta , David Durfee , Ayan Acharya , Sathiya Keerthi , Rahul Mazumder