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Related papers: The Implicit Bias of Adam on Separable Data

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Adam [Kingma & Ba, 2015] is the de facto optimizer in deep learning, yet its theoretical understanding remains limited. Prior analyses show that Adam favors solutions aligned with $\ell_\infty$-geometry, but these results are restricted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Beomhan Baek , Minhak Song , Chulhee Yun

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

We examine gradient descent on unregularized logistic regression problems, with homogeneous linear predictors on linearly separable datasets. We show the predictor converges to the direction of the max-margin (hard margin SVM) solution. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Daniel Soudry , Elad Hoffer , Mor Shpigel Nacson , Suriya Gunasekar , Nathan Srebro

We study the implicit bias of AdaGrad on separable linear classification problems. We show that AdaGrad converges to a direction that can be characterized as the solution of a quadratic optimization problem with the same feasible set as the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-11 Qian Qian , Xiaoyuan Qian

Adversarial training is a principled approach for training robust neural networks. Despite of tremendous successes in practice, its theoretical properties still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we provide new theoretical insights…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-29 Yan Li , Ethan X. Fang , Huan Xu , Tuo Zhao

This paper shows that the implicit bias of gradient descent on linearly separable data is exactly characterized by the optimal solution of a dual optimization problem given by a smoothed margin, even for general losses. This is in contrast…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-13 Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

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

We study continual learning on multiple linear classification tasks by sequentially running gradient descent (GD) for a fixed budget of iterations per task. When all tasks are jointly linearly separable and are presented in a cyclic/random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Hyunji Jung , Hanseul Cho , Chulhee Yun

Implicit bias describes the phenomenon where optimization-based training algorithms, without explicit regularization, show a preference for simple estimators even when more complex estimators have equal objective values. Multiple works have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Hrithik Ravi , Clayton Scott , Daniel Soudry , Yutong Wang

We study the implicit bias of gradient descent methods in solving a binary classification problem over a linearly separable dataset. The classifier is described by a nonlinear ReLU model and the objective function adopts the exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Tengyu Xu , Yi Zhou , Kaiyi Ji , Yingbin Liang

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

Adam is a widely used optimization algorithm in deep learning, yet the specific class of objective functions where it exhibits inherent advantages remains underexplored. Unlike prior studies requiring external schedulers and $\beta_2$ near…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhiwei Bai , Jiajie Zhao , Zhangchen Zhou , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Yaoyu Zhang

Although adaptive optimization algorithms such as Adam show fast convergence in many machine learning tasks, this paper identifies a problem of Adam by analyzing its performance in a simple non-convex synthetic problem, showing that Adam's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Wenjie Li , Zhaoyang Zhang , Xinjiang Wang , Ping Luo

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 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

Adaptive optimization methods (such as Adam) play a major role in LLM pretraining, significantly outperforming Gradient Descent (GD). Recent studies have proposed new smoothness assumptions on the loss function to explain the advantages of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Robin Yadav , Shuo Xie , Tianhao Wang , Zhiyuan Li

Most theoretical studies explaining the regularization effect in deep learning have only focused on gradient descent with a sufficient small learning rate or even gradient flow (infinitesimal learning rate). Such researches, however, have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Wei Huang , Weitao Du , Richard Yi Da Xu , Chunrui Liu

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

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

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam and Adagrad are widely used in machine learning, yet their effect on the generalization of learned models -- relative to methods like gradient descent -- remains poorly understood. Prior work on binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Adela DePavia , Vasileios Charisopoulos , Rebecca Willett
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