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: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: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 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
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.
The paper investigates how stochastic gradient descent (SGD) selects specific functional decompositions when training a deep linear residual network to learn the identity function. Although many weight configurations minimize the population loss, SGD consistently prefers particular solutions, especially under anisotropic label noise or different parametrizations. The authors explain this bias using an entropic loss term that penalizes the expected squared norm of the minibatch gradient, analytically characterizing its minimizers and showing that trained networks align with these predictions.
By Andy Arditi, Weian Xie, David Bau, Liu Ziyin
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