arXiv subjects

Stefano Bruno

Publications and source records attributed to Stefano Bruno.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Flatness-Aware Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics

Flatness of the loss landscape has been widely studied as an important perspective for understanding the behavior and generalization of deep learning algorithms. Motivated by this view, we propose Flatness-Aware Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (fSGLD), a first-order optimization method that biases learning its dynamics toward flat basins while retaining the computational and memory efficiency of SGD and SGLD. We provide a non-asymptotic theoretical analysis showing that fSGLD targets a flatness-biased Gibbs distribution under a theoretically prescribed coupling between the noise scale $\sigma$ and the inverse temperature $\beta$, together with explicit excess risk guarantees. We empirically evaluate fSGLD across standard optimizer benchmarks, Bayesian image classification, uncertainty quantification, and out-of-distribution detection, demonstrating consistently strong performance and reliable uncertainty estimates. Additional experiments confirm the effectiveness of the theoretically prescribed $\beta$-$\sigma$ coupling compared to decoupled choices.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Wasserstein Convergence of Score-based Generative Models under Semiconvexity and Discontinuous Gradients

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) approximate a data distribution by perturbing it with Gaussian noise and subsequently denoising it via a learned reverse diffusion process. These models excel at modeling complex data distributions and generating diverse samples, achieving state-of-the-art performance across domains such as computer vision, audio generation, reinforcement learning, and computational biology. Despite their empirical success, existing Wasserstein-2 convergence analysis typically assume strong regularity conditions-such as smoothness or strict log-concavity of the data distribution-that are rarely satisfied in practice. In this work, we establish the first non-asymptotic Wasserstein-2 convergence guarantees for SGMs targeting semiconvex distributions with potentially discontinuous gradients. Our upper bounds are explicit and sharp in key parameters, achieving optimal dependence of $O(\sqrt{d})$ on the data dimension $d$ and convergence rate of order one. The framework accommodates a wide class of practically relevant distributions, including symmetric modified half-normal distributions, Gaussian mixtures, double-well potentials, and elastic net potentials. By leveraging semiconvexity without requiring smoothness assumptions on the potential such as differentiability, our results substantially broaden the theoretical foundations of SGMs, bridging the gap between empirical success and rigorous guarantees in non-smooth, complex data regimes.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

On diffusion-based generative models and their error bounds: The log-concave case with full convergence estimates

We provide full theoretical guarantees for the convergence behaviour of diffusion-based generative models under the assumption of strongly log-concave data distributions while our approximating class of functions used for score estimation is made of Lipschitz continuous functions avoiding any Lipschitzness assumption on the score function. We demonstrate via a motivating example, sampling from a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean, the powerfulness of our approach. In this case, explicit estimates are provided for the associated optimization problem, i.e. score approximation, while these are combined with the corresponding sampling estimates. As a result, we obtain the best known upper bound estimates in terms of key quantities of interest, such as the dimension and rates of convergence, for the Wasserstein-2 distance between the data distribution (Gaussian with unknown mean) and our sampling algorithm. Beyond the motivating example and in order to allow for the use of a diverse range of stochastic optimizers, we present our results using an $L^2$-accurate score estimation assumption, which crucially is formed under an expectation with respect to the stochastic optimizer and our novel auxiliary process that uses only known information. This approach yields the best known convergence rate for our sampling algorithm.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Optimal regularity in time and space for stochastic porous medium equations

We prove optimal regularity estimates in Sobolev spaces in time and space for solutions to stochastic porous medium equations. The noise term considered here is multiplicative, white in time and coloured in space. The coefficients are assumed to be Hölder continuous and the cases of smooth coefficients of at most linear growth as well as $\sqrt{u}$ are covered by our assumptions. The regularity obtained is consistent with the optimal regularity derived for the deterministic porous medium equation in [Gess 2020] and [Gess, Sauer, Tadmor 2020] and the presence of the temporal white noise. The proof relies on a significant adaptation of velocity averaging techniques from their usual $L^1$ context to the natural $L^2$ setting of the stochastic case. We introduce a new mixed kinetic/mild representation of solutions to quasilinear SPDE and use $L^2$ based a priori bounds to treat the stochastic term.

math.PR↗