11 accepted papers
When computing gradients, deep learning training algorithms typically treat the mini-batch as a fundamental unit --- only returning batch-averaged gradients. Computing non-linear statistics of the mini-batch gradient distribution has traditionally been viewed as prohibitively expensive or requiring …
Curvature regularization techniques like Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) have shown great promise in improving generalization on vision tasks. However, we find that SAM performs poorly in domains like natural language processing (NLP), often degrading performance --- even with twice the compute b…
In recent years, SignSGD has garnered interest as both a practical optimizer as well as a simple model to understand adaptive optimizers like Adam. Though there is a general consensus that SignSGD acts to precondition optimization and reshapes noise, quantitatively understanding these effects in the…
Understanding neural network training dynamics at scale is an important open problem. Although realistic model architectures, optimizers, and data interact in complex ways that make predictive theory challenging, we show that compute-optimally trained models exhibit remarkably precise collective reg…
The success of modern machine learning is due in part to the adaptive optimization methods that have been developed to deal with the difficulties of training large models over complex datasets. One such method is gradient clipping: a practical procedure with limited theoretical underpinnings. In thi…
Recent work has shown that methods that regularize second order information like SAM can improve generalization in deep learning. Seemingly similar methods like weight noise and gradient penalties often fail to provide such benefits. We investigate this inconsistency and reveal its connection to the…
Curvature information -- particularly, the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian, known as the sharpness -- often forms the basis for learning rate tuners. However, recent work has shown that the curvature information undergoes complex dynamics during training, going from a phase of increasing shar…
The Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) optimization algorithm has been shown to control large eigenvalues of the loss Hessian and provide generalization benefits in a variety of settings. The original motivation for SAM was a modified loss function which penalized sharp minima; subsequent analyses h…
Recent studies of gradient descent with large step sizes have shown that there is often a regime with an initial increase in the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian (progressive sharpening), followed by a stabilization of the eigenvalue near the maximum value which allows convergence (edge of sta…
Deep equilibrium networks (DEQs) are a promising way to construct models which trade off memory for compute. However, theoretical understanding of these models is still lacking compared to traditional networks, in part because of the repeated application of a single set of weights. We show that DEQs…
Can deep learning solve multiple, very different tasks simultaneously? We investigate how the representations of the underlying tasks affect the ability of a single neural network to learn them jointly. We present theoretical and empirical findings that a single neural network is capable of simultan…