Related papers: A Simple Guard for Learned Optimizers
Define an optimizer as having memory $k$ if it stores $k$ dynamically changing vectors in the parameter space. Classical SGD has memory $0$, momentum SGD optimizer has $1$ and Adam optimizer has $2$. We address the following questions: How…
Scientific discovery is increasingly constrained by costly experiments and limited resources, underscoring the need for efficient optimization in AI for science. Bayesian Optimization (BO), though widely adopted for balancing exploration…
Adaptive optimization methods such as AdaGrad, RMSprop and Adam have been proposed to achieve a rapid training process with an element-wise scaling term on learning rates. Though prevailing, they are observed to generalize poorly compared…
Federated learning (FL) is a new machine learning framework which trains a joint model across a large amount of decentralized computing devices. Existing methods, e.g., Federated Averaging (FedAvg), are able to provide an optimization…
Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By…
Adam and AdamW are a class of default optimizers for training deep learning models in machine learning. These adaptive algorithms converge faster but generalize worse compared to SGD. In fact, their proved generalization error…
We study learning to learn for regression problems through the lens of hyperparameter tuning. We propose the Langevin Gradient Descent Algorithm (LGD), which approximates the mean of the posterior distribution defined by the loss function…
The use of momentum in stochastic optimization algorithms has shown empirical success across a range of machine learning tasks. Recently, a new class of stochastic momentum algorithms has emerged within the Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO)…
Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…
Methods for learning to search for structured prediction typically imitate a reference policy, with existing theoretical guarantees demonstrating low regret compared to that reference. This is unsatisfactory in many applications where the…
In many fields such as digital marketing, healthcare, finance, and robotics, it is common to have a well-tested and reliable baseline policy running in production (e.g., a recommender system). Nonetheless, the baseline policy is often…
Embedding parameterized optimization problems as layers into machine learning architectures serves as a powerful inductive bias. Training such architectures with stochastic gradient descent requires care, as degenerate derivatives of the…
Since DeepSeek-R1 popularized, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become the core part of training Reasoning LLMs. However, we find some deficiency that influences RL stability and inference efficiency, like zero-variance in…
Best-of-both-worlds algorithms for online learning which achieve near-optimal regret in both the adversarial and the stochastic regimes have received growing attention recently. Existing techniques often require careful adaptation to every…
Distributed optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning applications like federated learning, but existing methods often struggle with ill-conditioned problems and face stability-versus-speed tradeoffs. We introduce fractional…
Learned optimizers are algorithms that can themselves be trained to solve optimization problems. In contrast to baseline optimizers (such as momentum or Adam) that use simple update rules derived from theoretical principles, learned…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for post-training large language models (LLMs) in code editing, where group-relative methods, such as GRPO, are popular due to their critic-free and normalized advantage estimation. However, in…
Learning multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting previous knowledge, called Continual Learning(CL), remains a long-standing challenge for neural networks. Most existing methods rely on additional network capacity or data replay. In…
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is broadly utilized for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values because of its flexibility. Despite its effectiveness, it has been observed that the capability of DPO to generate…