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Adam outperforms SGD when training language models. Yet this advantage is not well-understood theoretically -- previous convergence analysis for Adam and SGD mainly focuses on the number of steps $T$ and is already minimax-optimal in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Shuo Xie , Mohamad Amin Mohamadi , Zhiyuan Li

The vast majority of successful deep neural networks are trained using variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. Recent attempts to improve SGD can be broadly categorized into two approaches: (1) adaptive learning rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-04 Michael R. Zhang , James Lucas , Geoffrey Hinton , Jimmy Ba

Adaptive gradient methods have become popular in optimizing deep neural networks; recent examples include AdaGrad and Adam. Although Adam usually converges faster, variations of Adam, for instance, the AdaBelief algorithm, have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Kushal Chakrabarti , Nikhil Chopra

Given the wide and ever growing range of different efficient Transformer attention mechanisms, it is important to identify which attention is most effective when given a task. In this work, we are also interested in combining different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam), which combines Adaptive Learning Rate and Momentum, would be the most popular stochastic optimizer for accelerating the training of deep neural networks. However, it is empirically known that Adam often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Zeke Xie , Xinrui Wang , Huishuai Zhang , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

Adaptive gradient methods, which adopt historical gradient information to automatically adjust the learning rate, despite the nice property of fast convergence, have been observed to generalize worse than stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Jinghui Chen , Dongruo Zhou , Yiqi Tang , Ziyan Yang , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

Adam is a widely used stochastic optimization method for deep learning applications. While practitioners prefer Adam because it requires less parameter tuning, its use is problematic from a theoretical point of view since it may not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Mingrui Liu , Wei Zhang , Francesco Orabona , Tianbao Yang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) forms the core optimization method for deep neural networks. While some theoretical progress has been made, it still remains unclear why SGD leads the learning dynamics in overparameterized networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Mingwei Wei , David J Schwab

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam have gained increasing popularity in deep learning optimization. However, it has been observed that compared with (stochastic) gradient descent, Adam can converge to a different solution with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Difan Zou , Yuan Cao , Yuanzhi Li , Quanquan Gu

Adaptive optimizers such as Adam have achieved great success in training large-scale models like large language models and diffusion models. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods, such as SGD on classical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Yiheng Zhang , Shaowu Wu , Yuanzhuo Xu , Jiajun Wu , Shang Xu , Steve Drew , Xiaoguang Niu

We consider convex SGD updates with a block-cyclic structure, i.e. where each cycle consists of a small number of blocks, each with many samples from a possibly different, block-specific, distribution. This situation arises, e.g., in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-24 Hubert Eichner , Tomer Koren , H. Brendan McMahan , Nathan Srebro , Kunal Talwar

There is a notable dearth of results characterizing the preconditioning effect of Adam and showing how it may alleviate the curse of ill-conditioning -- an issue plaguing gradient descent (GD). In this work, we perform a detailed analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Rudrajit Das , Naman Agarwal , Sujay Sanghavi , Inderjit S. Dhillon

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-22 Liangchen Luo , Yuanhao Xiong , Yan Liu , Xu Sun

Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Ameya Velingker , Balaji Venkatachalam , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

Heterogeneous graphs (HGs) are common in real-world scenarios and often exhibit heterophily. However, most existing studies focus on either heterogeneity or heterophily in isolation, overlooking the prevalence of heterophilic HGs in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Qin Chen , Guojie Song

The adaptive moment estimation algorithm Adam (Kingma and Ba) is a popular optimizer in the training of deep neural networks. However, Reddi et al. have recently shown that the convergence proof of Adam is problematic and proposed a variant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Tran Thi Phuong , Le Trieu Phong

From a simplified analysis of adaptive methods, we derive AvaGrad, a new optimizer which outperforms SGD on vision tasks when its adaptability is properly tuned. We observe that the power of our method is partially explained by a decoupling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-18 Pedro Savarese , David McAllester , Sudarshan Babu , Michael Maire

The Adam optimizer is a cornerstone of modern deep learning, yet the empirical necessity of each of its individual components is often taken for granted. This paper presents a focused investigation into the role of bias-correction, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Sam Laing , Antonio Orvieto

A recent line of ground-breaking results for permutation-based SGD has corroborated a widely observed phenomenon: random permutations offer faster convergence than with-replacement sampling. However, is random optimal? We show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Shashank Rajput , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

This paper studies the effect of data homogeneity on multi-agent stochastic optimization. We consider the decentralized stochastic gradient (DSGD) algorithm and perform a refined convergence analysis. Our analysis is explicit on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-09 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai