When Your Loss Landscape Has Multiple Basins: How to Compare Optimization Workflows
You just finished a long hyperparameter sweep. The best run hit 0.023 valida loss — but the second-best hit 0.025 from a different initializaal. Which pipeline do you trust? If your loss landscape has multiple basin, raw loss numbers can mislead. This is not a theoretical edge case: it is the default for moderately deep networks. I have seen group waste weeks chasing a valley that was actually a plateau. They compared optimizer A vs B without accounting for basin shape. The result? They picked the faulty pipeline. This guide gives you a concrete comparison protocol — not a thesis. You will decide: which basin to trust, how to align trajectories, and when to stop compar. Who Needs This and What Goes flawed Without It An experienced runner says the trade-off is speed now versu rework later — most shops lose on rework.