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. 30455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there.
By Muhammad Hamza (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur), Ayush Goel (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there. We introduce Curvature-Weighted Gradient Diversity (CWGD), a geometry-aware measure that weights per-sample gradient diversity by the inverse square root of the Hessian, providing a tighter proxy for the effective optimization noise.
arXiv:2606. 02078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The existing optimizers for deep neural networks (DNNs) typically rely on either the $\ell_2$ norm or the $\ell_\infty$ norm, resulting in optimizers that do not adapt well to substantial changes in curvature across parameter dimensions.
By Jianhao Xu, Zhuang Yang
arXiv:2510. 14074v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a framework for analyzing the learning dynamics of high-dimensional problems trained using one-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with data from multiple anisotropic classes.
By Elizabeth Collins-Woodfin, Inbar Seroussi
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
arXiv:2606. 00442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many machine learning techniques rely on approximating a loss function's curvature, but this is notoriously hard to do at the scale of modern deep networks.
By Artem Artemev, Rui Xia, Benjamin M. Boyd, Youjing Yu, Felix Dangel, Guillaume Hennequin, Alberto Bernacchia
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. Prior works have focused on empirical results or pursued a theoretical treatment under overly simplified settings.
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.
By Aristotelis Ballas, Christos Diou
arXiv:2607. 12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cooldown phase of a warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning-rate schedule, now a default in large-model pretraining, lowers the final training loss in some settings and does nothing in others.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).
By Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Adrian Riekert
arXiv:2608. 09523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural network (DNN) training with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants achieves strong empirical performance, yet classical optimization theory does not fully explain this success.
By Binchuan Qi