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
arXiv:2606. 28662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The flatness hypothesis suggests that flatness of the loss landscape, as measured by the eigenvalues of the loss Hessian, correlates with better neural network generalization.
By Yuto Omae, Kazuki Sakai, Yohei Kakimoto, Makoto Sasaki, Yusuke Sakai, Hirotaka Takahashi
arXiv:2604. 03146v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study high-dimensional convex empirical risk minimization (ERM) under general non-Gaussian data designs.
By Chiheb Yaakoubi, Cosme Louart, Malik Tiomoko, Zhenyu Liao
arXiv:2202. 08832v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a general class of optimization problems with decision variable $\boldsymbol{\Theta} \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times k}$ and cost function which is the sum of $n$ terms, each dependent on $\boldsymbol{\Theta}$ through the $k$-dimensional projection $\boldsymbol{\Theta}^\top \boldsymbol{x}_i$, where $\boldsymbol{x}_i$, $i \leq n$ are i.
By Andrea Montanari, Basil Saeed
arXiv:2610. 09206v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss-difference conditional mutual information (ld-CMI) uses the smallest of the standard observations in the supersample hierarchy of generalization bounds: it measures what a learner's loss differences reveal about which candidate of each pair it was trained on.
By Hazar Yueksel
arXiv:2610. 09206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Loss-difference conditional mutual information (ld-CMI) uses the smallest of the standard observations in the supersample hierarchy of generalization bounds: it measures what a learner's loss differences reveal about which candidate of each pair it was trained on.
By Hazar Yueksel
arXiv:2601. 18115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of learning a single neuron under standard squared loss in the presence of arbitrary label noise and group-level distributional shifts, for a broad family of covariate distributions.
By Guyang Cao, Shuyao Li, Sushrut Karmalkar, Jelena Diakonikolas
arXiv:2609.31101v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The flatness of the loss landscape at a minimizer is a widely used heuristic for reasoning about neural-network generalization, yet evidence for this...
By Brandon Livio Annesi, Davide Straziota, Enrico Maria Malatesta
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by seeking parameters whose loss is robust to local adversarial perturbations, but the quantitative mechanism underlying its implicit bias toward flat minima remains unclear. In particular, the perturbation radius $ρ$ is typically treated as an isolated tuning parameter, despite defining the neighborhood in which SAM measures sharpness.
arXiv:2607. 13631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Hessian matrix is an important quantity of interest when it comes to studying the loss landscape and optimization dynamics in deep learning, as well as designing measures of generalization, second-order learning algorithms, etc.
By Jasraj Singh, Enea Monzio Compagnoni, Antonio Orvieto
The paper presents a near-complete, nonasymptotic generalization theory for multilayer neural networks using path regularization, applicable to broad Lipschitz loss functions without requiring bounded loss or extreme network hyperparameters. It provides an explicit upper bound that addresses approximation rates in generalized Barron spaces and demonstrates the double descent phenomenon for ReLU networks. The authors claim near-minimax optimality for regression problems and plan to establish matching lower bounds in future work.
By Hao Yu
arXiv:2608. 03197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by seeking parameters whose loss is robust to local adversarial perturbations, but the quantitative mechanism underlying its implicit bias toward flat minima remains unclear.
By Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang