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Adam has been at the core of large-scale training for almost a decade, yet a simple empirical fact remains unaccounted for: both validation scores and the qualitative behaviour of the training runs improve when the momentum parameters…

Despite Adam demonstrating faster empirical convergence than SGD in many applications, much of the existing theory yields guarantees essentially comparable to those of SGD, leaving the empirical performance gap insufficiently explained. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ruinan Jin , Yingbin Liang , Shaofeng Zou

Many adaptive optimization methods have been proposed and used in deep learning, in which Adam is regarded as the default algorithm and widely used in many deep learning frameworks. Recently, many variants of Adam, such as Adabound, RAdam…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Wei Yuan , Kai-Xin Gao

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam have gained extreme popularity due to their success in training complex neural networks and less sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning compared to SGD. However, it has been recently shown that Adam can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Pedro Savarese

NLP research has explored different neural model architectures and sizes, datasets, training objectives, and transfer learning techniques. However, the choice of optimizer during training has not been explored as extensively. Typically,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Nefeli Gkouti , Prodromos Malakasiotis , Stavros Toumpis , Ion Androutsopoulos

Adam has been shown to outperform gradient descent on large language models by a larger margin than on other tasks, but it is unclear why. We show that a key factor in this performance gap is the heavy-tailed class imbalance found in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Frederik Kunstner , Robin Yadav , Alan Milligan , Mark Schmidt , Alberto Bietti

It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Pan Zhou , Jiashi Feng , Chao Ma , Caiming Xiong , Steven Hoi , Weinan E

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-12-11 Lehan Chen , Yuji Nakatsukasa

Despite superior training outcomes, adaptive optimization methods such as Adam, Adagrad or RMSprop have been found to generalize poorly compared to Stochastic gradient descent (SGD). These methods tend to perform well in the initial portion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-21 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

Training deep neural networks is a structured optimization problem, because the parameters are naturally represented by matrices and tensors rather than by vectors. Under this structural representation, it has been widely observed that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Kang An , Yuxing Liu , Rui Pan , Yi Ren , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Tong Zhang

This paper studies the role of data homogeneity on multi-agent optimization. Concentrating on the decentralized stochastic gradient (DSGD) algorithm, we characterize the transient time, defined as the minimum number of iterations required…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-30 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) is a cornerstone optimization algorithm in deep learning, widely recognized for its flexibility with adaptive learning rates and efficiency in handling large-scale data. However, despite its practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Ruinan Jin , Xiao Li , Yaoliang Yu , Baoxiang Wang

The success of deep learning can be attributed to various factors such as increase in computational power, large datasets, deep convolutional neural networks, optimizers etc. Particularly, the choice of optimizer affects the generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Anirudh Maiya , Inumella Sricharan , Anshuman Pandey , Srinivas K. S

Asynchronous stochastic gradient methods are central to scalable distributed optimization, particularly when devices differ in computational capabilities. Such settings arise naturally in federated learning, where training takes place on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Artavazd Maranjyan , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main approach for training deep networks: it moves towards the optimum of the cost function by iteratively updating the parameters of a model in the direction of the gradient of the loss evaluated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Loris Nanni , Gianluca Maguolo , Alessandra Lumini

Adam is a popular and widely used adaptive gradient method in deep learning, which has also received tremendous focus in theoretical research. However, most existing theoretical work primarily analyzes its full-batch version, which differs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Xuan Tang , Han Zhang , Yuan Cao , Difan Zou

Artificial intelligence has advanced rapidly through large neural networks trained on massive datasets using thousands of GPUs or TPUs. Such training can occupy entire data centers for weeks and requires enormous computational and energy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-07 Artavazd Maranjyan

Convolutional neural networks often dominate fully-connected counterparts in generalization performance, especially on image classification tasks. This is often explained in terms of 'better inductive bias'. However, this has not been made…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-05 Zhiyuan Li , Yi Zhang , Sanjeev Arora

We provide a theoretical analysis of Adam under non-stationary stochastic objectives, separating two regimes: Euclidean tracking under adaptive strong monotonicity of the Adam-preconditioned mean-gradient operator, and high-probability…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-07 Sharan Sahu , Abir Sarkar , Cameron J. Hogan , Martin T. Wells

Deep learning algorithms - typically consisting of a class of deep neural networks trained by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method - are nowadays the key ingredients in many artificial intelligence (AI) systems and have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Steffen Dereich , Robin Graeber , Arnulf Jentzen