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The Implicit Bias of Adam on Separable Data

Machine Learning 2024-06-18 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Adam has become one of the most favored optimizers in deep learning problems. Despite its success in practice, numerous mysteries persist regarding its theoretical understanding. In this paper, we study the implicit bias of Adam in linear logistic regression. Specifically, we show that when the training data are linearly separable, Adam converges towards a linear classifier that achieves the maximum \ell_\infty-margin. Notably, for a general class of diminishing learning rates, this convergence occurs within polynomial time. Our result shed light on the difference between Adam and (stochastic) gradient descent from a theoretical perspective.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2406.10650,
  title  = {The Implicit Bias of Adam on Separable Data},
  author = {Chenyang Zhang and Difan Zou and Yuan Cao},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10650},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

33 pages, 2 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:07:16.097Z