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. In particular, the perturbation radius $ρ$ is typically treated as an isolated tuning parameter, despite defining the neighborhood in which SAM measures sharpness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2607. 18306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood.
The paper investigates the "edge of stability" phenomenon in deep learning, where Hessian eigenvalues remain stable above a classically predicted unstable threshold. It shows that many first‑order optimizers, including gradient descent, can violate this stability bound by up to a factor of 21.1, and that this deviation depends systematically on the optimizer used. The authors propose a new stability threshold based on the directional Hessian and gradient‑alignment score, which removes optimizer‑dependent offsets and offers consistent predictions while providing diagnostic tools to understand how optimizers balance temporal and spatial budgets.
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.
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.
The paper introduces Sparsity-Adaptive Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SA‑SAM), a method that adjusts the perturbation radius in sharpness-aware training to remain consistent as model sparsity increases. It also evaluates a Magnitude‑Weighted Hessian (MWH) importance metric derived from second‑order analysis. Experiments on CIFAR‑10‑C, CIFAR‑100‑C, and ImageNet‑100‑C show that SA‑SAM improves corruption robustness at 80–90% sparsity while maintaining clean accuracy, and the study reports inference throughput at deployment‑relevant sparsity levels.
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.
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 $\eta$.
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.