arXiv Machine Learning

Flatness and Generalization: Learning Multi-Index Models with Homogeneous Neural Networks

arXiv:2606. 04429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A common heuristic used to explain the generalization of first-order gradient methods on non-convex neural networks is that "flat interpolators generalize well" (Hochreiter and Schmidhuber, 1994; Keskar et al.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Benign interpolation and Occam's razor

arXiv:2608. 03386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contemporary deep learning methods generalize well even when they fit their training data perfectly, a phenomenon known as benign interpolation.

By Tom F. Sterkenburg, Daniel A. Herrmann, Jan-Willem Romeijn
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Fisher-Geometric Sharpness and the Implicit Bias of SGD toward Flat Minima

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 Machine Learning
Jun 30

Universality of empirical risk minimization

arXiv:2202. 08832v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a general class of optimization problems with decision variable $\boldsymbol{\Theta} \in \mathbb{R}^{p \times k}$ and cost function which is the sum of $n$ terms, each dependent on $\boldsymbol{\Theta}$ through the $k$-dimensional projection $\boldsymbol{\Theta}^\top \boldsymbol{x}_i$, where $\boldsymbol{x}_i$, $i \leq n$ are i.

By Andrea Montanari, Basil Saeed