Related papers: Anon: Extrapolating Adaptivity Beyond SGD and Adam
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…
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…
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…
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…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) can fail spectacularly when bootstrapped temporal-difference (TD) updates amplify their own errors, driving the critic toward extreme and unusable Q-values. A key counterintuitive insight of this work is…
We study distributed adaptive algorithms with local updates (intermittent communication). Despite the great empirical success of adaptive methods in distributed training of modern machine learning models, the theoretical benefits of local…
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…
The training of diffusion models is often absent in the evaluation of new optimization techniques. In this work, we benchmark recent optimization algorithms for training a diffusion model for denoising flow trajectories. We observe that…
Optimization acceleration techniques such as momentum play a key role in state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Recently, generic vector sequence extrapolation techniques, such as regularized nonlinear acceleration (RNA) of Scieur et…
Due to the nonlinear nature of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), one can not guarantee convergence to a unique global minimum of the loss when using optimizers relying only on local information, such as SGD. Indeed, this was a primary source of…
Adaptive gradient methods are typically used for training over-parameterized models. To better understand their behaviour, we study a simplistic setting -- smooth, convex losses with models over-parameterized enough to interpolate the data.…
The adaptive optimizer for training neural networks has continually evolved to overcome the limitations of the previously proposed adaptive methods. Recent studies have found the rare counterexamples that Adam cannot converge to the optimal…
Diffractive optical neural networks (DONNs), leveraging free-space light wave propagation for ultra-parallel, high-efficiency computing, have emerged as promising artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators. However, their inherent lack of…
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…
This paper introduces EXAdam ($\textbf{EX}$tended $\textbf{Adam}$), a novel optimization algorithm that builds upon the widely-used Adam optimizer. EXAdam incorporates two key enhancements: (1) new debiasing terms for improved moment…
In this paper we explore acceleration techniques for large scale nonconvex optimization problems with special focuses on deep neural networks. The extrapolation scheme is a classical approach for accelerating stochastic gradient descent for…
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…
Recommender systems (RecSys) are increasingly emphasizing scaling, leveraging larger architectures and more interaction data to improve personalization. Yet, despite the optimizer's pivotal role in training, modern RecSys pipelines almost…
We propose the generalized Newton's method (GeN) -- a Hessian-informed approach that applies to any optimizer such as SGD and Adam, and covers the Newton-Raphson method as a sub-case. Our method automatically and dynamically selects the…
Adaptive algorithms like AdaGrad and AMSGrad are successful in nonconvex optimization owing to their parameter-agnostic ability -- requiring no a priori knowledge about problem-specific parameters nor tuning of learning rates. However, when…