Related papers: Flatness and Gradient Alignment Are Both Necessary…

Tabular learning transforms raw features into optimized spaces for downstream tasks, but its effectiveness deteriorates under distribution shifts between training and testing data. We formalize this challenge as the Distribution Shift…

The sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) algorithm and its variants, including gap guided SAM (GSAM), have been successful at improving the generalization capability of deep neural network models by finding flat local minima of the empirical…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is widely used to seek flatter minima -- often linked to better generalization. In its standard implementation, SAM updates the current iterate using the loss gradient evaluated at a point perturbed by…

Deep neural networks achieve high performance across many domains but can still face challenges in generalization when optimization is influenced by small or noisy gradient components. Sharpness-Aware Minimization improves generalization by…

Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it…

We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…

Semi-supervised learning addresses label scarcity and high annotation costs in medical image segmentation by exploiting the latent information in unlabeled data to enhance model performance. Traditional discriminative segmentation relies on…

Integrating human perceptual priors into the training of neural networks has been shown to raise model generalization, serve as an effective regularizer, and align models with human expertise for applications in high-risk domains. Existing…

We propose a homogeneous multilayer perceptron parameterization with polynomial hidden layer width pattern and analyze its training dynamics under stochastic gradient descent with depthwise gradient scaling in a general supervised learning…

Recent studies highlight the effectiveness of flat minima in enhancing generalization, with sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) achieving state-of-the-art performance. Additionally, insights into the intrinsic geometry of the loss landscape…

Safety post-training can improve the harmfulness and policy compliance of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it may also reduce general utility, a phenomenon often described as the \emph{alignment tax}. We study this trade-off through the…

We propose regularizing the empirical loss for semi-supervised learning by acting on both the input (data) space, and the weight (parameter) space. We show that the two are not equivalent, and in fact are complementary, one affecting the…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Generalization is one of the most important problems in deep learning (DL). In the overparameterized regime in neural networks, there exist many low-loss solutions that fit the training data equally well. The key question is which solution…

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has been proven to be an effective optimization technique for improving generalization in overparameterized models. While prior works have explored the implicit regularization of SAM in simple two-core…

Spatiotemporal Graph Learning (SGL) under Zero-Inflated Distribution (ZID) is crucial for urban risk management tasks, including crime prediction and traffic accident profiling. However, SGL models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks,…

Segment Anything Model (SAM) exhibits remarkable zero-shot segmentation capability; however, its prohibitive computational costs make edge deployment challenging. Although post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a promising compression…

The ability to learn sequentially from different data sites is crucial for a deep network in solving practical medical image diagnosis problems due to privacy restrictions and storage limitations. However, adapting on incoming site leads to…

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has been shown to improve the generalization of neural networks. However, each SAM update requires \emph{sequentially} computing two gradients, effectively doubling the per-iteration cost compared to base…