Jeremy M. Cohen

Jeremy M. Cohen, Behrooz Ghorbani, Shankar Krishnan et al. · deepmind

Very little is known about the training dynamics of adaptive gradient methods like Adam in deep learning. In this paper, we shed light on the behavior of these algorithms in the full-batch and sufficiently large batch settings. Specifically, we empirically demonstrate that during full-batch training, the maximum eigenvalue of the preconditioned Hessian typically equilibrates at a certain numerical value -- the stability threshold of a gradient descent algorithm. For Adam with step size $η$ and $β_1 = 0.9$, this stability threshold is $38/η$. Similar effects occur during minibatch training, especially as the batch size grows. Yet, even though adaptive methods train at the ``Adaptive Edge of Stability'' (AEoS), their behavior in this regime differs in a significant way from that of non-adaptive methods at the EoS. Whereas non-adaptive algorithms at the EoS are blocked from entering high-curvature regions of the loss landscape, adaptive gradient methods at the AEoS can keep advancing into high-curvature regions, while adapting the preconditioner to compensate. Our findings can serve as a foundation for the community's future understanding of adaptive gradient methods in deep learning.

Jeremy M. Cohen, Simran Kaur, Yuanzhi Li et al.

We empirically demonstrate that full-batch gradient descent on neural network training objectives typically operates in a regime we call the Edge of Stability. In this regime, the maximum eigenvalue of the training loss Hessian hovers just above the numerical value $2 / \text{(step size)}$, and the training loss behaves non-monotonically over short timescales, yet consistently decreases over long timescales. Since this behavior is inconsistent with several widespread presumptions in the field of optimization, our findings raise questions as to whether these presumptions are relevant to neural network training. We hope that our findings will inspire future efforts aimed at rigorously understanding optimization at the Edge of Stability. Code is available at https://github.com/locuslab/edge-of-stability.

Jeremy M Cohen, Elan Rosenfeld, J. Zico Kolter

We show how to turn any classifier that classifies well under Gaussian noise into a new classifier that is certifiably robust to adversarial perturbations under the $\ell_2$ norm. This "randomized smoothing" technique has been proposed recently in the literature, but existing guarantees are loose. We prove a tight robustness guarantee in $\ell_2$ norm for smoothing with Gaussian noise. We use randomized smoothing to obtain an ImageNet classifier with e.g. a certified top-1 accuracy of 49% under adversarial perturbations with $\ell_2$ norm less than 0.5 (=127/255). No certified defense has been shown feasible on ImageNet except for smoothing. On smaller-scale datasets where competing approaches to certified $\ell_2$ robustness are viable, smoothing delivers higher certified accuracies. Our strong empirical results suggest that randomized smoothing is a promising direction for future research into adversarially robust classification. Code and models are available at http://github.com/locuslab/smoothing.

Jeremy M. Cohen, Alex Damian, Ameet Talwalkar et al.

Traditional theories of optimization cannot describe the dynamics of optimization in deep learning, even in the simple setting of deterministic training. The challenge is that optimizers typically operate in a complex, oscillatory regime called the "edge of stability." In this paper, we develop theory that can describe the dynamics of optimization in this regime. Our key insight is that while the *exact* trajectory of an oscillatory optimizer may be challenging to analyze, the *time-averaged* (i.e. smoothed) trajectory is often much more tractable. To analyze an optimizer, we derive a differential equation called a "central flow" that characterizes this time-averaged trajectory. We empirically show that these central flows can predict long-term optimization trajectories for generic neural networks with a high degree of numerical accuracy. By interpreting these central flows, we are able to understand how gradient descent makes progress even as the loss sometimes goes up; how adaptive optimizers "adapt" to the local loss landscape; and how adaptive optimizers implicitly navigate towards regions where they can take larger steps. Our results suggest that central flows can be a valuable theoretical tool for reasoning about optimization in deep learning.

Kaiqi Jiang, Jeremy Cohen, Yuanzhi Li

The study of Neural Tangent Kernels (NTKs) in deep learning has drawn increasing attention in recent years. NTKs typically actively change during training and are related to feature learning. In parallel, recent work on Gradient Descent (GD) has found a phenomenon called Edge of Stability (EoS), in which the largest eigenvalue of the NTK oscillates around a value inversely proportional to the step size. However, although follow-up works have explored the underlying mechanism of such eigenvalue behavior in depth, the understanding of the behavior of the NTK eigenvectors during EoS is still missing. This paper examines the dynamics of NTK eigenvectors during EoS in detail. Across different architectures, we observe that larger learning rates cause the leading eigenvectors of the final NTK, as well as the full NTK matrix, to have greater alignment with the training target. We then study the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon and provide a theoretical analysis for a two-layer linear network. Our study enhances the understanding of GD training dynamics in deep learning.

Simran Kaur, Jeremy Cohen, Zachary C. Lipton

For a standard convolutional neural network, optimizing over the input pixels to maximize the score of some target class will generally produce a grainy-looking version of the original image. However, Santurkar et al. (2019) demonstrated that for adversarially-trained neural networks, this optimization produces images that uncannily resemble the target class. In this paper, we show that these "perceptually-aligned gradients" also occur under randomized smoothing, an alternative means of constructing adversarially-robust classifiers. Our finding supports the hypothesis that perceptually-aligned gradients may be a general property of robust classifiers. We hope that our results will inspire research aimed at explaining this link between perceptually-aligned gradients and adversarial robustness.