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Adam with decoupled weight decay, also known as AdamW, is widely acclaimed for its superior performance in language modeling tasks, surpassing Adam with $\ell_2$ regularization in terms of generalization and optimization. However, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Shuo Xie , Zhiyuan Li

The Adam optimizer is a popular choice in contemporary deep learning, due to its strong empirical performance. However we observe that in privacy sensitive scenarios, the traditional use of Differential Privacy (DP) with the Adam optimizer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-25 Qiaoyue Tang , Frederick Shpilevskiy , Mathias Lécuyer

We introduce AdamS, a simple yet effective alternative to Adam for large language model (LLM) pretraining and post-training. By leveraging a novel denominator, i.e., the root of weighted sum of squares of the momentum and the current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Huishuai Zhang , Bohan Wang , Luoxin Chen

Recently, Arjevani et al. [1] established a lower bound of iteration complexity for the first-order optimization under an $L$-smooth condition and a bounded noise variance assumption. However, a thorough review of existing literature on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Bohan Wang , Jingwen Fu , Huishuai Zhang , Nanning Zheng , Wei Chen

In this paper, we study the convergence of the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) algorithm under unconstrained non-convex smooth stochastic optimizations. Despite the widespread usage in machine learning areas, its theoretical properties…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-06 Yusu Hong , Junhong Lin

We establish a data-dependent notion of algorithmic stability for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and employ it to develop novel generalization bounds. This is in contrast to previous distribution-free algorithmic stability results for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Ilja Kuzborskij , Christoph H. Lampert

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

Ever since Reddi et al. 2018 pointed out the divergence issue of Adam, many new variants have been designed to obtain convergence. However, vanilla Adam remains exceptionally popular and it works well in practice. Why is there a gap between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Yushun Zhang , Congliang Chen , Naichen Shi , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Quan Luo

The adaptive moment estimation (Adam) optimizer proposed by Kingma & Ba (2014) is presumably the most popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) in artificial intelligence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Steffen Dereich , Thang Do , Arnulf Jentzen

We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Idan Amir , Tomer Koren , Roi Livni

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

Time-series forecasting often faces challenges from non-stationarity, particularly distributional drift, where the data distribution evolves over time. This dynamic behavior can undermine the effectiveness of adaptive optimizers, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Yuze Dong , Jinsong Wu

We provide an improved analysis of normalized SGD showing that adding momentum provably removes the need for large batch sizes on non-convex objectives. Then, we consider the case of objectives with bounded second derivative and show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-19 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta

We observe that the traditional use of DP with the Adam optimizer introduces a bias in the second moment estimation, due to the addition of independent noise in the gradient computation. This bias leads to a different scaling for low…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Qiaoyue Tang , Mathias Lécuyer

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

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

The existing analysis of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) degrades dramatically when any delay is large, giving the impression that performance depends primarily on the delay. On the contrary, we prove much better guarantees…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-21 Konstantin Mishchenko , Francis Bach , Mathieu Even , Blake Woodworth

In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Ziming Zhang , Wenju Xu , Alan Sullivan

Optimization algorithms are core methods by which machine learning models iteratively minimize loss functions, update parameters, learn from data, and improve performance. Momentum SGD and AdamW represent two important optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Meng Zhu , Quan Xiao , Weidong Min

Since its invention in 2014, the Adam optimizer has received tremendous attention. On one hand, it has been widely used in deep learning and many variants have been proposed, while on the other hand their theoretical convergence property…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Zhishuai Guo , Yi Xu , Wotao Yin , Rong Jin , Tianbao Yang