arXiv:2608. 12869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are generative models that support exact inference and, unlike deep neural networks, admit an exact and tractable measure of loss-surface curvature: the trace of the Hessian of the log-likelihood.
Probabilistic Circuits (PCs) are generative models that support exact inference and, unlike deep neural networks, admit an exact and tractable measure of loss-surface curvature: the trace of the Hessian of the log-likelihood. Recent work regularizes this trace globally to bias learning toward flatter, better generalizing optima.
arXiv:2607. 06151v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generalization remains a pivotal challenge in deep learning, where traditional optimizers like Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often converge to sharp minima, leading to overfitting and reduced performance on unseen data.
arXiv:2607. 18306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood.
arXiv:2603. 11946v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Probabilistic circuits (PCs) enable exact and tractable inference but employ data independent mixture weights that limit their ability to capture local geometry of the data manifold.
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.
arXiv:2606. 06772v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Characterizing the optimization dynamics and statistical performance of over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) remains a central challenge in understanding the remarkable success of deep learning.
arXiv:2606. 06772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding the generalization performance of over-parameterized neural networks has become a central topic in deep learning theory.
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...
arXiv:2505. 21423v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The remarkable generalization properties of overparameterized networks are often attributed to implicit biases, such as norm minimization at small learning rates and low sharpness in the Edge-of-Stability regime.
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.
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.
The article surveys recent progress in tractable probabilistic generative modeling, with a focus on Probabilistic Circuits (PCs). It offers a unified view of the trade‑offs between expressivity and tractability, outlining design principles, algorithmic extensions, and a taxonomy of the field. The review also covers deep and hybrid PCs that integrate ideas from deep neural models, and highlights challenges and open questions for future research.