Papers › Fluctuation-dissipation relations for stochastic gradient descent

Fluctuation-dissipation relations for stochastic gradient descent

28 Sep 2018ICLR 2019 5arXiv:1810.00004archive 2025-07-28

Sho Yaida

The notion of the stationary equilibrium ensemble has played a central role in statistical mechanics. In machine learning as well, training serves as generalized equilibration that drives the probability distribution of model parameters toward stationarity. Here, we derive stationary fluctuation-dissipation relations that link measurable quantities and hyperparameters in the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. These relations hold exactly for any stationary state and can in particular be used to adaptively set training schedule. We can further use the relations to efficiently extract information pertaining to a loss-function landscape such as the magnitudes of its Hessian and anharmonicity. Our claims are empirically verified.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

cybertronai/pytorch-fd mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report
facebookresearch/FDR_scheduler mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

BIG-bench Machine Learning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections