English

On the Convergence of Adaptive Gradient Methods for Nonconvex Optimization

Machine Learning 2024-06-21 v4 Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

Adaptive gradient methods are workhorses in deep learning. However, the convergence guarantees of adaptive gradient methods for nonconvex optimization have not been thoroughly studied. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained convergence analysis for a general class of adaptive gradient methods including AMSGrad, RMSProp and AdaGrad. For smooth nonconvex functions, we prove that adaptive gradient methods in expectation converge to a first-order stationary point. Our convergence rate is better than existing results for adaptive gradient methods in terms of dimension. In addition, we also prove high probability bounds on the convergence rates of AMSGrad, RMSProp as well as AdaGrad, which have not been established before. Our analyses shed light on better understanding the mechanism behind adaptive gradient methods in optimizing nonconvex objectives.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.05671,
  title  = {On the Convergence of Adaptive Gradient Methods for Nonconvex Optimization},
  author = {Dongruo Zhou and Jinghui Chen and Yuan Cao and Ziyan Yang and Quanquan Gu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.05671},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

25 pages, 2 tables. Published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:36:18.297Z