arXiv Machine Learning

Flatness and Gradient Alignment Are Both Necessary: Spectral-Aware Gradient-Aligned Exploration for Multi-Distribution Learning

arXiv:2605. 07914v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Averaged Mirror Descent and Dual Gradient Methods: Convergent Algorithms for Entropic Gromov-Wasserstein Problems

The paper studies algorithms for computing the Entropic Gromov-Wasserstein (EGW) distance, a measure of discrepancy between metric measure spaces. It introduces Averaged Mirror Descent (AMD), which averages successive Mirror Descent steps and is proven to converge for any cost function, and shows that a dual gradient method with a fixed step size also converges for arbitrary costs, even when iterations are inexact. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that both AMD and the dual gradient method succeed on cases where classical Mirror Descent fails.

By Joanna Marks, Gabriel Rioux, Riccardo Passeggeri
arXiv Statistics ML
2d ago

Exact information accounting for SGD methods

arXiv:2610.00446v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As an alternative to the standard geometric analyses, we give an exact, information-theoretic analysis of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its v...

By Akshay Balsubramani
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

arXiv:2606. 20469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A widely held intuition in deep learning is that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly favors flat minima and that flat minima generalize better, but standard Euclidean measures of flatness such as the trace or maximum eigenvalue of the loss Hessian are not invariant under reparametrizations that preserve the network function, which undermines the theoretical foundations of this narrative.

By Md Sakir Ahmed, Kumaresh Sarmah, Hemen Dutta