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We propose AdaMuon, a novel optimizer that combines element-wise adaptivity with orthogonal updates for large-scale neural network training. AdaMuon incorporates two tightly coupled mechanisms: (1) an element-wise second momentum estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Chongjie Si , Debing Zhang , Wei Shen

Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly RL from verifiable reward (RLVR), has become a crucial phase of training large language models (LLMs) and a key focus of current scaling efforts. However, optimization practices in RL largely follow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Sagnik Mukherjee , Lifan Yuan , Pavan Jayasinha , Dilek Hakkani-Tür , Hao Peng

Adaptive first-order optimizers are fundamental tools in deep learning, although they may suffer from poor generalization due to the nonuniform gradient scaling. In this work, we propose AdamL, a novel variant of the Adam optimizer, that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-27 Lu Xia , Stefano Massei

Adam-type methods, the extension of adaptive gradient methods, have shown great performance in the training of both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models. In particular, Adam-type optimizers have been widely used empirically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Zehao Dou , Yuanzhi Li

Adaptive optimizers with decoupled weight decay, such as AdamW, are the de facto standard for pre-training large transformer-based generative models. Yet the quadratic nature of the $\ell_2$ penalty embedded in weight decay drives all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Fu-Ming Guo , Yingfang Fan

Adam has achieved strong empirical success, but its theory remains incomplete even in the deterministic full-batch setting, largely because adaptive preconditioning and momentum are tightly coupled. In this work, a convergent reformulation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-13 Yaxin Yu , Long Chen , Zeyi Xu

We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program…

With the decline of Moore's law, optimizing program performance has become a major focus of software research. However, high-level optimizations such as API and algorithm changes remain elusive due to the difficulty of understanding the…

Mode connectivity has been widely studied, yet the role of the optimizer remains underexplored. We revisit it through optimizer-induced implicit regularization, asking how connectivity behaves when restricted to solutions constrained by a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Fangzhao Zhang , Sungyoon Kim , Erica Zhang , Yiqi Jiang , Mert Pilanci

Training language models becomes increasingly expensive with scale, prompting numerous attempts to improve optimization efficiency. Despite these efforts, the Adam optimizer remains the most widely used, due to a prevailing view that it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Rosie Zhao , Depen Morwani , David Brandfonbrener , Nikhil Vyas , Sham Kakade

The residual update of a pre-norm Transformer layer admits an interpretation as one step of a first-order optimizer acting on a surrogate token energy, wherein the attention and MLP sublayers function as gradient oracles. Based on this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Nai-Chieh Huang , Jiayun Wu

Recent work [4] analyses the local convergence of Adam in a neighbourhood of an optimal solution for a twice-differentiable function. It is found that the learning rate has to be sufficiently small to ensure local stability of the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-14 Guoqiang Zhang , Niwa Kenta , W. Bastiaan Kleijn

Layer-wise preconditioning methods are a family of memory-efficient optimization algorithms that introduce preconditioners per axis of each layer's weight tensors. These methods have seen a recent resurgence, demonstrating impressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Thomas T. Zhang , Behrad Moniri , Ansh Nagwekar , Faraz Rahman , Anton Xue , Hamed Hassani , Nikolai Matni

Training deep neural networks, particularly in computer vision tasks, often suffers from noisy gradients and unstable convergence, which hinder performance and generalization. In this paper, we propose LyAm, a novel optimizer that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Elmira Mirzabeigi , Sepehr Rezaee , Kourosh Parand

Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Son Nguyen , Bo Liu , Lizhang Chen , Qiang Liu

We implement the adaptive step size scheme from the optimization methods AdaGrad and Adam in a novel variant of the Proximal Gradient Method (PGM). Our algorithm, dubbed AdaProx, avoids the need for explicit computation of the Lipschitz…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-06 Peter Melchior , Rémy Joseph , Fred Moolekamp

We propose Adam-mini, an optimizer that achieves on par or better performance than AdamW with 50% less memory footprint. Adam-mini reduces memory by cutting down the learning rate resources in Adam (i.e., $1/\sqrt{v}$). By investigating the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Yushun Zhang , Congliang Chen , Ziniu Li , Tian Ding , Chenwei Wu , Diederik P. Kingma , Yinyu Ye , Zhi-Quan Luo , Ruoyu Sun

The concept of learning to optimize involves utilizing a trainable optimization strategy rather than relying on manually defined full gradient estimations such as ADAM. We present a framework that jointly trains the full gradient estimator…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Ruiqi Wang , Diego Klabjan

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

Muon has emerged as an efficient alternative to Adam for pretraining, yet remains underused for fine-tuning. A key obstacle is that most open models are pretrained with Adam, and naively switching to Muon for fine-tuning leads to degraded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xingyu Qu , Peigeng Huang , Samuel Horvath