arXiv:2601. 10962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear.
By Ning Yang, Yikuan Zhang, Qi Ouyang, Chao Tang, Yuhai Tu
arXiv:2505. 22578v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The optimization of neural networks under weight decay remains poorly understood from a theoretical standpoint.
By Etienne Boursier, Matthew Bowditch, Matthias Englert, Ranko Lazic
arXiv:2605. 29547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators.
By Ruoran Xu, Borong She, Xiaobo Jin, Qiufeng Wang
arXiv:2606. 06722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The training of neural networks often entails objective functions that are not globally $L$-smooth.
By Leonardo Galli, Curtis Fox, Wiebke Bartolomaeus, Mark Schmidt, Holger Rauhut
arXiv:2606. 31282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep neural networks often contain far more parameters than needed to fit their training data, yet they achieve impressive generalization.
By Ari Pakman, Lior Kreimer, Yakir Berchenko
arXiv:2510. 03164v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning rate warm-up -- increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training -- has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood.
By Foivos Alimisis, Rustem Islamov, Aurelien Lucchi
arXiv:2606. 04476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the gradient descent dynamics for jointly training both layers of a one-hidden-layer ReLU network to fit a linear target function.
By Berk Tinaz, Changzhi Xie, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
The paper investigates why the SCAFFOLD algorithm, designed to be robust to data heterogeneity in federated learning, often underperforms compared to the simpler FedAvg. It identifies the presence of Edge of Stability (EoS) dynamics and progressive sharpening as key factors, showing that both algorithms exhibit EoS behavior across various architectures and hyperparameters. Crucially, the study finds that at the EoS, SCAFFOLD’s ability to estimate the global gradient deteriorates, as indicated by a weakened correlation between sharpness and gradient estimation error, explaining its limited practical advantage.
By Anant Khandelwal, Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu
arXiv:2605. 22432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern deep learning commonly relies on AdamW with prescribed learning rate schedules, but recent works challenge both components: Schedule-Free optimization removes explicit schedules via iterate averaging, and Muon improves the update geometry by orthogonalizing momentum for matrix parameters.
By Jueun Kim, Baekrok Shin, Jihun Yun, Beomhan Baek, Minhak Song, Chulhee Yun
arXiv:2606. 27759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training binary neural networks (BNNs) from scratch is dominated by the straight-through estimator (STE), whose forward/backward mismatch produces severe accuracy degradation as networks deepen.
By Evan Gibson Smith, Bashima Islam
arXiv:2605. 15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization.
By Lute Lillo, Nick Cheney
arXiv:2604. 00230v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural collapse (NC) -- the convergence of penultimate-layer features to a simplex equiangular tight frame -- is well understood at equilibrium, but the dynamics governing its onset remain poorly characterised.
By Anamika Paul Rupa