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Motivated by the super-diffusivity of self-repelling random walk, which has roots in statistical physics, this paper develops a new perturbation mechanism for optimization algorithms. In this mechanism, perturbations are adapted to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-29 Xin Guo , Jiequn Han , Mahan Tajrobehkar , Wenpin Tang

Adam is shown not being able to converge to the optimal solution in certain cases. Researchers recently propose several algorithms to avoid the issue of non-convergence of Adam, but their efficiency turns out to be unsatisfactory in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Zhiming Zhou , Qingru Zhang , Guansong Lu , Hongwei Wang , Weinan Zhang , Yong Yu

Adaptive prompting mechanisms have been proposed to enhance vision-language models by dynamically tailoring prompts to inputs. However, in frozen few-shot prompt learning with CLIP-style backbones, we systematically observe that adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yunxuan Fang , Ziwei Zhang , Xinhe Wang

Transformers are difficult to optimize with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and largely rely on adaptive optimizers such as Adam. Despite their empirical success, the reasons behind Adam's superior performance over SGD remain poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Peter Henderson , Joshua Romoff , Joelle Pineau

Full-batch gradient descent on neural networks drives the largest Hessian eigenvalue to the threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate. This phenomenon, the Edge of Stability, has resisted a unified explanation: existing accounts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Elon Litman

Gradient-based first-order adaptive optimization methods such as the Adam optimizer are prevalent in training artificial networks, achieving the state-of-the-art results. This work attempts to answer the question whether it is viable for…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Yukun Yang , Peng Li

Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence. Widely…

Learning rate adaptation is a popular topic in machine learning. Gradient Descent trains neural nerwork with a fixed learning rate. Learning rate adaptation is proposed to accelerate the training process through adjusting the step size in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Bozhou Chen , Hongzhi Wang , Chenmin Ba

A quadratic approximation of neural network loss landscapes has been extensively used to study the optimization process of these networks. Though, it usually holds in a very small neighborhood of the minimum, it cannot explain many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Chao Ma , Daniel Kunin , Lei Wu , Lexing Ying

Is the standard weight decay in AdamW truly optimal? Although AdamW decouples weight decay from adaptive gradient scaling, a fundamental conflict remains: the Radial Tug-of-War. In deep learning, gradients tend to increase parameter norms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Hao Chen , Jinghui Yuan , Hanmin Zhang

Here I present a small update to the bias-correction term in the Adam optimizer that has the advantage of making smaller gradient updates in the first several steps of training. With the default bias-correction, Adam may actually make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-25 John St John

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

In this paper, we identify and analyze a recurring training loss pattern, which we term the \textit{Epochal Sawtooth Phenomenon (ESP)}, commonly observed during training with adaptive gradient-based optimizers, particularly Adam optimizer.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Qi Liu , Wanjing Ma

We propose a continuous-time scheme for large-scale optimization that introduces individual, adaptive momentum coefficients regulated by the kinetic energy of each model parameter. This approach automatically adjusts to local landscape…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Aikaterini Karoni , Rajit Rajpal , Benedict Leimkuhler , Gabriel Stoltz

Since the 21st century, artificial intelligence has been leading a new round of industrial revolution. Under the training framework, the optimization algorithm aims to stably converge high-dimensional optimization to local and even global…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Meng Zhu , Quan Xiao , Weidong Min

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

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

Current state-of-the-art optimizers are adaptive gradient-based optimization methods such as Adam. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in formulating gradient-based optimizers in a probabilistic framework for better modeling the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Haotian Chen , Anna Kuzina , Babak Esmaeili , Jakub M Tomczak

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