NeurIPS 2023

Riemannian SAM: Sharpness-Aware Minimization on Riemannian Manifolds 

Jihun Yun and Eunho Yang 

Nowadays, understanding the geometry of the loss landscape shows promise in enhancing a model's generalization ability. In this work, we draw upon prior works that apply geometric principles to optimization and present a novel approach to improve robustness and generalization ability for constrained optimization problems. Indeed, this paper aims to generalize the Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) optimizer to Riemannian manifolds. In doing so, we first extend the concept of sharpness and introduce a novel notion of sharpness on manifolds. To support this notion of sharpness, we present a theoretical analysis characterizing generalization capabilities with respect to manifold sharpness, which demonstrates a tighter bound on the generalization gap, a result not known before. Motivated by this analysis, we introduce our algorithm, Riemannian Sharpness-Aware Minimization (RSAM). To demonstrate RSAM's ability to enhance generalization ability, we evaluate and contrast our algorithm on a broad set of problems, such as image classification and contrastive learning across different datasets, including CIFAR100, CIFAR10, and FGVCAircraft.