Training an overparameterized neural network can yield minimizers of the same level of training loss and yet different generalization capabilities. With evidence that indicates a correlation between sharpness of minima and their generalization errors, increasing efforts have been made to develop an optimization method to explicitly find flat minima as more generalizable solutions. This sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) strategy, however, has not been studied much yet as to how overparameterization can actually affect its behavior. In this work, we analyze SAM under varying degrees of overparameterization and present both empirical and theoretical results that suggest a critical influence of overparameterization on SAM. Specifically, we first use standard techniques in optimization to prove that SAM can achieve a linear convergence rate under overparameterization in a stochastic setting. We also show that the linearly stable minima found by SAM are indeed flatter and have more uniformly distributed Hessian moments compared to those of SGD. These results are corroborated with our experiments that reveal a consistent trend that the generalization improvement made by SAM continues to increase as the model becomes more overparameterized. We further present that sparsity can open up an avenue for effective overparameterization in practice.

训练过参数的神经网络可以得到相同训练损失水平但具有不同泛化能力的极小值。本文分析了过参数化对锐度感知最小化策略（SAM）行为的关键影响，并提供了经验和理论结果，表明过参数化对SAM具有重要影响。具体而言，我们证明了在随机设置中SAM可以实现线性收敛速度，并且发现SAM找到的具有线性稳定性的极小值相比SGD更加平坦且具有更均匀分布的Hessian矩。我们的实验结果进一步表明，随着模型过参数化程度的增加，SAM的泛化性能持续改善。我们还展示了稀疏性在实践中为有效的过参数化提供了途径。

过度参数化对锐度感知最小化的影响：实证与理论分析