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Transformers are difficult to optimize with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and largely rely on adaptive optimizers such as Adam. Despite their empirical success, the reasons behind Adam's superior performance over SGD remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Frederik Kunstner , Jacques Chen , Jonathan Wilder Lavington , Mark Schmidt

Adam is known to perform significantly better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in language models, a phenomenon for which a number of explanations have been proposed. In this work, we revisit this "optimizer gap" through a series of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Teodora Srećković , Jonas Geiping , Antonio Orvieto

Despite its widespread adoption, Adam's advantage over Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) lacks a comprehensive theoretical explanation. This paper investigates Adam's sensitivity to rotations of the parameter space. We observe that Adam's…

In the context of stochastic gradient descent(SGD) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam),researchers have recently proposed optimization techniques that transition from Adam to SGD with the goal of improving both convergence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-01 Jiaxuan Wang , Jenna Wiens

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the most popular optimization algorithm in deep learning, adaptive algorithms such as Adam have established empirical advantages over SGD in some deep learning applications such as training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Yan Pan , Yuanzhi Li

Optimizing spectral graph neural networks (GNNs) remains a critical challenge in the field, yet the underlying processes are not well understood. In this paper, we investigate the inherent differences between graph convolution parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Fangbing Liu , Qing Wang

It is widely believed that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs significantly worse than adaptive optimizers such as Adam in pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet the underlying reason for this gap remains unclear. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Athanasios Glentis , Dawei Li , Chung-Yiu Yau , Mingyi Hong

This paper aims to clearly distinguish between Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) and Adam in terms of their convergence rates. We demonstrate that Adam achieves a faster convergence compared to SGDM under the condition of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Bohan Wang , Huishuai Zhang , Qi Meng , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Ming Ma , Wei Chen

Transformers have proved effective in many NLP tasks. However, their training requires non-trivial efforts regarding designing cutting-edge optimizers and learning rate schedulers carefully (e.g., conventional SGD fails to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Liyuan Liu , Xiaodong Liu , Jianfeng Gao , Weizhu Chen , Jiawei Han

Adam is the de facto optimization algorithm for several deep learning applications, but an understanding of its implicit bias and how it differs from other algorithms, particularly standard first-order methods such as (stochastic) gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Bhavya Vasudeva , Jung Whan Lee , Vatsal Sharan , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is attractive from a speed perspective because workers do not wait for synchronization. However, the Transformer model converges poorly with asynchronous SGD, resulting in substantially lower…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Alham Fikri Aji , Kenneth Heafield

Despite the popularity of the Adam optimizer in practice, most theoretical analyses study Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as a proxy for Adam, and little is known about how the solutions found by Adam differ. In this paper, we show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-05 Xinghan Li , Haodong Wen , Kaifeng Lyu

Adaptive optimization algorithms, such as Adam and RMSprop, have shown better optimization performance than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in some scenarios. However, recent studies show that they often lead to worse generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-19 Zijun Zhang , Lin Ma , Zongpeng Li , Chuan Wu

Adam is widely adopted in practical applications due to its fast convergence. However, its theoretical analysis is still far from satisfactory. Existing convergence analyses for Adam rely on the bounded smoothness assumption, referred to as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Bohan Wang , Yushun Zhang , Huishuai Zhang , Qi Meng , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu , Zhi-Quan Luo , Wei Chen

The ADAM optimizer is exceedingly popular in the deep learning community. Often it works very well, sometimes it doesn't. Why? We interpret ADAM as a combination of two aspects: for each weight, the update direction is determined by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Lukas Balles , Philipp Hennig

Adaptive optimizers, such as Adam, have achieved remarkable success in deep learning. A key component of these optimizers is the so-called preconditioning matrix, providing enhanced gradient information and regulating the step size of each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Yun Yue , Zhiling Ye , Jiadi Jiang , Yongchao Liu , Ke Zhang

The Transformer architecture has inarguably revolutionized deep learning, overtaking classical architectures like multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At its core, the attention block differs in form and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Weronika Ormaniec , Felix Dangel , Sidak Pal Singh

The Adam optimizer is widely used for transformer optimization in practice, which makes understanding the underlying optimization mechanisms an important problem. However, due to the Adam's complexity, theoretical analysis of how it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Bingrui Li , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Zhanpeng Zhou , Taiji Suzuki , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

One of the primary reasons behind the success of neural networks has been the emergence of an array of new, highly-successful optimizers, perhaps most importantly the Adam optimizer. It is widely used for training neural networks, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Benedikt Brantner
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