English

A new regret analysis for Adam-type algorithms

Machine Learning 2020-03-24 v1 Machine Learning Optimization and Control

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on a theory-practice gap for Adam and its variants (AMSgrad, AdamNC, etc.). In practice, these algorithms are used with a constant first-order moment parameter β1\beta_{1} (typically between 0.90.9 and 0.990.99). In theory, regret guarantees for online convex optimization require a rapidly decaying β10\beta_{1}\to0 schedule. We show that this is an artifact of the standard analysis and propose a novel framework that allows us to derive optimal, data-dependent regret bounds with a constant β1\beta_{1}, without further assumptions. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our analysis on a wide range of different algorithms and settings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.09729,
  title  = {A new regret analysis for Adam-type algorithms},
  author = {Ahmet Alacaoglu and Yura Malitsky and Panayotis Mertikopoulos and Volkan Cevher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.09729},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:22:40.472Z