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Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ansh Nagwekar

Despite the vast empirical evidence supporting the efficacy of adaptive optimization methods in deep learning, their theoretical understanding is far from complete. This work introduces novel SDEs for commonly used adaptive optimizers:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Enea Monzio Compagnoni , Tianlin Liu , Rustem Islamov , Frank Norbert Proske , Antonio Orvieto , Aurelien Lucchi

Balancing convergence speed, generalization capability, and computational efficiency remains a core challenge in deep learning optimization. First-order gradient descent methods, epitomized by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam,…

Adaptive optimization algorithms, particularly Adam and its variant AdamW, are fundamental components of modern deep learning. However, their training dynamics lack comprehensive theoretical understanding, with limited insight into why…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Rhys Gould , Hidenori Tanaka

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants form the backbone of deep learning optimization, yet the underlying dynamics of their gradient behavior remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we reinterpret gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zhipeng Yao , Rui Yu , Guisong Chang , Ying Li , Yu Zhang , Dazhou Li

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

In modern deep learning, the models are learned by applying gradient updates using an optimizer, which transforms the updates based on various statistics. Optimizers are often hand-designed and tuning their hyperparameters is a big part of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Gus Kristiansen , Mark Sandler , Andrey Zhmoginov , Nolan Miller , Anirudh Goyal , Jihwan Lee , Max Vladymyrov

In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on the convergence properties of Adam-family methods for nonsmooth optimization, especially in the training of nonsmooth neural networks. We introduce a novel two-timescale framework that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-20 Nachuan Xiao , Xiaoyin Hu , Xin Liu , Kim-Chuan Toh

In recent years, deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various fields such as image recognition, natural language processing, and speech recognition. The effectiveness of deep learning largely depends on the optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 David Shulman

Scalable training of large models (like BERT and GPT-3) requires careful optimization rooted in model design, architecture, and system capabilities. From a system standpoint, communication has become a major bottleneck, especially on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Hanlin Tang , Shaoduo Gan , Ammar Ahmad Awan , Samyam Rajbhandari , Conglong Li , Xiangru Lian , Ji Liu , Ce Zhang , Yuxiong He

Traditional analyses in non-convex optimization typically rely on the smoothness assumption, namely requiring the gradients to be Lipschitz. However, recent evidence shows that this smoothness condition does not capture the properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Michael Crawshaw , Mingrui Liu , Francesco Orabona , Wei Zhang , Zhenxun Zhuang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has taken the stage as the primary workhorse for large-scale machine learning. It is often used with its adaptive variants such as AdaGrad, Adam, and AMSGrad. This paper proposes an adaptive stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Tianyi Chen , Ziye Guo , Yuejiao Sun , Wotao Yin

Second-order optimization methods, which leverage curvature information, offer faster and more stable convergence than first-order methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Adam. However, their practical adoption is hindered by…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Saitao Zhang , Yubiao Luo , Shiqing Wang , Pushen Zuo , Yongxiang Li , Lunshuai Pan , Zheng Miao , Zhong Sun

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

SignSGD compresses each stochastic gradient coordinate to a single bit, offering substantial memory and communication savings, but its 1-bit quantization removes magnitude information and is known to leave a generalization gap relative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Haoran Chen , Wentao Wang

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

We introduce LDAdam, a memory-efficient optimizer for training large models, that performs adaptive optimization steps within lower dimensional subspaces, while consistently exploring the full parameter space during training. This strategy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Thomas Robert , Mher Safaryan , Ionut-Vlad Modoranu , Dan Alistarh

Deep neural network learning can be formulated as a non-convex optimization problem. Existing optimization algorithms, e.g., Adam, can learn the models fast, but may get stuck in local optima easily. In this paper, we introduce a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Jiawei Zhang , Fisher B. Gouza

Optimizers that further adjust the scale of gradient, such as Adam, Natural Gradient (NG), etc., despite widely concerned and used by the community, are often found poor generalization performance, compared with Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Zedong Tang , Fenlong Jiang , Junke Song , Maoguo Gong , Hao Li , Fan Yu , Zidong Wang , Min Wang

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