activity
20202026
most citedTemperature check: theory and practice for training models with softmax-cross-entropy losses

13 citations · 18 across the 20 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

20 papers

math.OC2026

Phases of Muon: When Muon Eclipses SignSGD

Elliot Paquette, Noah Marshall, Lucas Benigni +3

Recently, Muon and related spectral optimizers have demonstrated strong empirical performance as scalable stochastic methods, often outperforming Adam. Yet their behaviour remains…

cs.LG2026

High dimensional theory of two-phase optimizers

Atish Agarwala

The trend towards larger training setups has brought a renewed interest in partially asynchronous two-phase optimizers which optimize locally and then synchronize across workers. A…

cs.LG2026

What do near-optimal learning rate schedules look like?

Hiroki Naganuma, Atish Agarwala, Priya Kasimbeg +1

A basic unanswered question in neural network training is: what is the best learning rate schedule shape for a given workload? The choice of learning rate schedule is a key factor…

cs.LG2025

Per-example gradients: a new frontier for understanding and improving optimizers

Vincent Roulet, Atish Agarwala

Training algorithms in deep learning usually treat a mini-batch of samples as a single object; they average gradients over the mini-batch, and then process the average in various w…

cs.LG2025

Scaling Collapse Reveals Universal Dynamics in Compute-Optimally Trained Neural Networks

Shikai Qiu, Lechao Xiao, Andrew Gordon Wilson +2

What scaling limits govern neural network training dynamics when model size and training time grow in tandem? We show that despite the complex interactions between architecture, tr…

cs.LG2025

How far away are truly hyperparameter-free learning algorithms?

Priya Kasimbeg, Vincent Roulet, Naman Agarwal +4

Despite major advances in methodology, hyperparameter tuning remains a crucial (and expensive) part of the development of machine learning systems. Even ignoring architectural choi…

cs.LG2025

Avoiding spurious sharpness minimization broadens applicability of SAM

Sidak Pal Singh, Hossein Mobahi, Atish Agarwala +1

Curvature regularization techniques like Sharpness Aware Minimization (SAM) have shown great promise in improving generalization on vision tasks. However, we find that SAM performs…

stat.ML2024

Exact Risk Curves of signSGD in High-Dimensions: Quantifying Preconditioning and Noise-Compression Effects

Ke Liang Xiao, Noah Marshall, Atish Agarwala +1

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 consen…

cs.LG2024★ 1 cited

Stepping on the Edge: Curvature Aware Learning Rate Tuners

Vincent Roulet, Atish Agarwala, Jean-Bastien Grill +3

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 ha…

stat.ML2024

To Clip or not to Clip: the Dynamics of SGD with Gradient Clipping in High-Dimensions

Noah Marshall, Ke Liang Xiao, Atish Agarwala +1

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 comp…

cs.LG2024

High dimensional analysis reveals conservative sharpening and a stochastic edge of stability

Atish Agarwala, Jeffrey Pennington

Recent empirical and theoretical work has shown that the dynamics of the large eigenvalues of the training loss Hessian have some remarkably robust features across models and datas…

stat.ML2024

Feature learning as alignment: a structural property of gradient descent in non-linear neural networks

Daniel Beaglehole, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Atish Agarwala

Understanding the mechanisms through which neural networks extract statistics from input-label pairs through feature learning is one of the most important unsolved problems in supe…

cs.LG2024★ 2 cited

Neglected Hessian component explains mysteries in Sharpness regularization

Yann N. Dauphin, Atish Agarwala, Hossein Mobahi

Recent work has shown that methods like SAM which either explicitly or implicitly penalize second order information can improve generalization in deep learning. Seemingly similar m…

cs.LG2023

On the Interplay Between Stepsize Tuning and Progressive Sharpening

Vincent Roulet, Atish Agarwala, Fabian Pedregosa

Recent empirical work has revealed an intriguing property of deep learning models by which the sharpness (largest eigenvalue of the Hessian) increases throughout optimization until…

cs.LG2023

SAM operates far from home: eigenvalue regularization as a dynamical phenomenon

Atish Agarwala, Yann N. Dauphin

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 se…

cs.LG2022★ 2 cited

Second-order regression models exhibit progressive sharpening to the edge of stability

Atish Agarwala, Fabian Pedregosa, Jeffrey Pennington

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…

cs.LG2022

Deep equilibrium networks are sensitive to initialization statistics

Atish Agarwala, Samuel S. Schoenholz

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 com…

cs.LG2021

One Network Fits All? Modular versus Monolithic Task Formulations in Neural Networks

Atish Agarwala, Abhimanyu Das, Brendan Juba +4

Can deep learning solve multiple tasks simultaneously, even when they are unrelated and very different? We investigate how the representations of the underlying tasks affect the ab…

cs.LG2020★ 13 cited

Temperature check: theory and practice for training models with softmax-cross-entropy losses

Atish Agarwala, Jeffrey Pennington, Yann Dauphin +1

The softmax function combined with a cross-entropy loss is a principled approach to modeling probability distributions that has become ubiquitous in deep learning. The softmax func…

cs.LG2020

Learning the gravitational force law and other analytic functions

Atish Agarwala, Abhimanyu Das, Rina Panigrahy +1

Large neural network models have been successful in learning functions of importance in many branches of science, including physics, chemistry and biology. Recent theoretical work…