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:2608. 06630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pruning reduces the inference cost of large language models, but existing criteria primarily preserve large activations or reconstruct layer outputs.
arXiv:2607. 14466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Noise injection is a well-known technique in stochastic optimization.
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:2604.13287v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Weight pruning is a common technique for compressing large neural networks. We focus on the challenging post-training one-shot setting, where a pre...
arXiv:2606. 02267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples poses a significant challenge for real-world deployment.
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.
The paper introduces Fast Preemptive Robustification (FPR), a lightweight defense that enhances the robustness of deep neural networks against transferable adversarial attacks. By sharpening Laplacian responses through a single 3×3 channel‑wise convolution, FPR eliminates the need for surrogate models, iterative optimization, or specialized training. Experiments show that FPR lowers untargeted attack success rates by 12.7% and reduces targeted attack success from 10.7% to 4.1%.
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.
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. 04173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) deployed on resource-constrained neuromorphic hardware face three concurrent challenges: the need for model compression through pruning, vulnerability to adversarial input perturbations, and susceptibility to hardware-induced weight faults such as stuck-at-zero errors.
arXiv:2607. 18306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood.
SAGG: Sample-Adaptive Gradient Gating for Robust Multimodal Learning under Heterogeneous Corruption proposes a new method for handling sample-heterogeneous corruption in multimodal training. The authors prove that batch-level, sample-agnostic linear estimators with a shared modulation parameter inevitably incur bias, and that a sample-level all-or-nothing gating strategy is the only unbiased approach within a natural estimator class. SAGG implements a binary retain-or-discard decision per sample using an online feature-norm quality test and a truncation mechanism for variance control, and demonstrates convergence to clean-loss stationary points while achieving superior performance over ten existing methods on Kinetics-Sounds and UCF-101 under various corruption scenarios.