Asymptotic Unbiased Sample Sampling to Speed Up Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Abstract Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has emerged as a promising approach for effectively reducing the generalization error. However, SAM incurs twice the computational cost compared to the base optimizer (e.g., SGD). We propose Asymptotic Unbiased data sampling to accelerate SAM (AUSAM), which maintains the model's generalization capacity while significantly enhancing computational efficiency. Concretely, we probabilistically sample a subset of data points beneficial for SAM optimization based on a theoretically guaranteed criterion, i.e., the Gradient Norm of each Sample (GNS). We further approximate the GNS by evaluating the difference in loss values before and after perturbation in SAM. As a plug-and-play, architecture-agnostic method, our approach consistently accelerates SAM across various tasks and networks, i.e., classification, human pose estimation, and network quantization. On CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet, AUSAM achieves results comparable to SAM while providing a speedup of over 70%. By adjusting hyperparameters, AUSAM can match the speed of the base optimizer while significantly surpassing the base optimizer's performance. Compared to recent dynamic data pruning methods, AUSAM is better suited for SAM and excels in maintaining performance. Additionally, AUSAM accelerates optimization in human pose estimation and model quantization without sacrificing performance, demonstrating its broad practicality.