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. , 2017), where flatness can be measured by the trace of the Hessian of the empirical loss.
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.
By Harsh Vardhan, Hossein Taheri, Arya Mazumdar
arXiv:2609.38540v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A valid curvature upper bound need not justify either a robustness certificate or an intervention on an intrinsic predictor property. We demonstrate th...
By Vicente Opazo, Jose Calatayud-Mateu, Cristobal Rojas, Cristian Buc Calderon
arXiv:2609.31101v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The flatness of the loss landscape at a minimizer is a widely used heuristic for reasoning about neural-network generalization, yet evidence for this...
By Brandon Livio Annesi, Davide Straziota, Enrico Maria Malatesta
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: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
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:2608.24568v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Deep neural networks generalize well despite their highly nonconvex, overparameterized loss landscapes, a phenomenon often associated with the geomet...
By Paul Caillon, Christophe Cerisara, Alexandre Allauzen
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.
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.
By Maria Matveev, Vit Fojtik, Hung-Hsu Chou, Gitta Kutyniok, Johannes Maly
arXiv:2606. 28662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The flatness hypothesis suggests that flatness of the loss landscape, as measured by the eigenvalues of the loss Hessian, correlates with better neural network generalization.
By Yuto Omae, Kazuki Sakai, Yohei Kakimoto, Makoto Sasaki, Yusuke Sakai, Hirotaka Takahashi
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