This repository includes the programs to reproduce the results of the paper Taxonomizing local versus global structure in neural network loss landscapes. The code has been tested on Python 3.8.12 with PyTorch 1.10.1 and CUDA 10.2.

(Caricature of different types of loss landscapes). Globally well-connected versus globally poorly-connected loss landscapes; and locally sharp versus locally flat loss landscapes. Globally well-connected loss landscapes can be interpreted in terms of a global “rugged convexity”; and globally well-connected and locally flat loss landscapes can be further divided into two sub-cases, based on the similarity of trained models.

(2D phase plot). Partitioning the 2D load-like—temperature-like diagram into different phases of learning, varying batch size to change temperature and varying model width to change load. Models are trained with ResNet18 on CIFAR-10. All plots are on the same set of axes.

First, use the command below to install the necessary packages. This step creats an environment called loss_landscape.

conda env create

Then, use the following command to generate the training scripts.

cd workspace/src
python example_experiment.py --metrics train

The training script can be found in the folder bash_scripts/width_lr_decay.

We recommend using some job scheduler to execute the training script. For example, use the following to generate an example slurm script for training.

python example_experiment.py --metrics train --generate-slurm-scripts

Use the following command to generate the scripts for different generalization metrics.

python example_experiment.py --metrics curve CKA hessian dist loss_acc

You can use our prior results, which are compressed and stored in workspace/checkpoint/results.tar.gz. Please decompress them using the command below.

cd workspace/checkpoint/
tar -xzvf results.tar.gz

After the generalization metrics are obtained, use the jupyter notebook Load_temperature_plots.ipynb in workspace/src/visualization/ to visualize the results.

We appreciate it if you would please cite the following paper if you found the repository useful for your work:

@inproceedings{yang2021taxonomizing,
  title={Taxonomizing local versus global structure in neural network loss landscapes},
  author={Yang, Yaoqing and Hodgkinson, Liam and Theisen, Ryan and Zou, Joe and Gonzalez, Joseph E and Ramchandran, Kannan and Mahoney, Michael W},
  booktitle={Thirty-Fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year={2021}
}

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