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We consider Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a gradient-based optimization method for deep networks that has exhibited performance improvements on image and language prediction problems. We show that when SAM is applied with a convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-12 Peter L. Bartlett , Philip M. Long , Olivier Bousquet

A large body of theory and empirical work hypothesizes a connection between the flatness of a neural network's loss landscape during training and its performance. However, there have been conceptually opposite pieces of evidence regarding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yizhou Xu , Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Isaac Chuang , Liu Ziyin

Real-world datasets exhibit imbalances of varying types and degrees. Several techniques based on re-weighting and margin adjustment of loss are often used to enhance the performance of neural networks, particularly on minority classes. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Harsh Rangwani , Sumukh K Aithal , Mayank Mishra , R. Venkatesh Babu

There has long been plenty of theoretical and empirical evidence supporting the success of ensemble learning. Deep ensembles in particular take advantage of training randomness and expressivity of individual neural networks to gain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Anh Bui , Vy Vo , Tung Pham , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

The challenge of overfitting, in which the model memorizes the training data and fails to generalize to test data, has become increasingly significant in the training of large neural networks. To tackle this challenge, Sharpness-Aware…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Zixiang Chen , Junkai Zhang , Yiwen Kou , Xiangning Chen , Cho-Jui Hsieh , Quanquan Gu

Standard deep learning relies on Backpropagation (BP), which is constrained by biologically implausible weight symmetry and suffers from significant gradient interference within dense representations. To mitigate these bottlenecks, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Fanping Liu , Hua Yang , Jiasi Zou

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

Domain generalization for semantic segmentation aims to mitigate the degradation in model performance caused by domain shifts. However, in many real-world scenarios, we are unable to access the model parameters and architectural details due…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Qingmei Li , Yang Zhang , Peifeng Zhang , Haohuan Fu , Juepeng Zheng

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) enhances generalization by minimizing the maximum training loss within a predefined neighborhood around the parameters. However, its practical implementation approximates this as gradient ascent(s)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Jianlong Chen , Zhiming Zhou

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) was recently introduced as a regularization procedure for training deep neural networks. It simultaneously minimizes the fitness (or loss) function and the so-called fitness sharpness. The latter serves as…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-20 Illya Bakurov , Nathan Haut , Wolfgang Banzhaf

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

The recently proposed optimization algorithm for deep neural networks Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) suggests perturbing parameters before gradient calculation by a gradient ascent step to guide the optimization into parameter space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Marlon Becker , Frederick Altrock , Benjamin Risse

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization due to complex and non-convex loss landscapes. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a popular solution that smooths the loss landscape by minimizing the maximized change of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Tianshuo Xu , Xiaoshuai Sun , Tongliang Liu , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

A new paradigm to estimate the gradient of a black-box scalar function is introduced, considering it as a member of a set of admissible gradients that are computed using existing function samples. Results on gradient estimate accuracy,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-28 Lorenzo Sabug , Fredy Ruiz , Lorenzo Fagiano

Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization caused by complex and non-convex loss landscapes. One of the popular solutions is Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), which smooths the loss landscape via minimizing the maximized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been instrumental in improving deep neural network training by minimizing both training loss and loss sharpness. Despite the practical success, the mechanisms behind SAM's generalization enhancements…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Tao Li , Pan Zhou , Zhengbao He , Xinwen Cheng , Xiaolin Huang

Sign-based optimization methods have become popular in machine learning due to their favorable communication cost in distributed optimization and their surprisingly good performance in neural network training. Furthermore, they are closely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-20 Lukas Balles , Fabian Pedregosa , Nicolas Le Roux

Sharpness-aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization in large-scale model training by linking loss landscape geometry to generalization. However, challenges such as mislabeled noisy data and privacy concerns have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Chenyang Ren , Yifan Jia , Huanyi Xie , Zhaobin Xu , Tianxing Wei , Liangyu Wang , Lijie Hu , Di Wang

Targeting solutions over `flat' regions of the loss landscape, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a powerful tool to improve generalizability of deep neural network based learning. While several SAM variants have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Yilang Zhang , Bingcong Li , Georgios B. Giannakis

Federated learning enables a large amount of edge computing devices to learn a model without data sharing jointly. As a leading algorithm in this setting, Federated Average FedAvg, which runs Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in parallel on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Xiaoxiao Li , Zhao Song , Runzhou Tao , Guangyi Zhang