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
arXiv:2301. 06308v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains.
By Hoki Kim, Jinseong Park, Yujin Choi, Jaewook Lee
arXiv:2607. 21716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Due to the complexity of neural network loss landscapes, optimization theory is forced to rely on idealized models, and there is generally a tradeoff between how theoretically tractable the model is, and how accurately it describes the true optimization dynamics.
By Alexandru Meterez, Pranav Ajit Nair, Depen Morwani, Cengiz Pehlevan, Sham Kakade, Alex Damian
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:2607. 18306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood.
By Zhen Huang, Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang
arXiv:2607. 08380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An important quantity in the theory of gradient descent (GD) is the \emph{sharpness}, defined as the largest eigenvalue of the objective Hessian.
By Lachlan Ewen MacDonald, Ren\'e Vidal
arXiv:2607. 21999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-tailed learning couples two sources of poor generalization: head classes dominate training exposure, while under-represented classes often converge to sharper regions of the loss landscape.
By Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang
arXiv:2606. 11431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) extends Gradient Descent (GD) beyond Euclidean geometry and has recently reappeared as a lens for KL-regularized policy optimization in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training.
By Shira Vansover-Hager, Matan Schliserman, Ofir Schlisselberg, Tomer Koren
arXiv:2603. 05002v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) is a phenomenon where the sharpness (largest eigenvalue) of the Hessian approaches and then hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$ during gradient descent (GD) with step size $\eta$.
By Rustem Islamov, Michael Crawshaw, Jeremy Cohen, Robert Gower
arXiv:2604. 14669v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) methods are widely used when gradients are unavailable or prohibitively expensive, including black-box learning and memory-efficient fine-tuning of large models, yet their optimization dynamics in deep learning remain underexplored.
By Minhak Song, Liang Zhang, Bingcong Li, Niao He, Michael Muehlebach, Sewoong Oh
arXiv:2608. 15105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent progress in optimization research has highlighted the sharpness of the loss landscape as a key factor in narrowing the generalization gap.
By Tanapat Ratchatorn, Masayuki Tanaka
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