arXiv Machine Learning

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606. 16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Trust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces ZFO, a lightweight framework that separates direction selection from step-size determination in large‑scale neural network optimization. ZFO uses a trusted first‑order optimizer to pick a search direction and then performs only two additional objective evaluations to build a local curvature‑aware model, selecting an adaptive step within a bounded interval. The authors provide theoretical guarantees for reliable curvature estimation, near‑optimal step selection, and convergence to a stationary point, and demonstrate that ZFO improves optimization and final performance over fixed‑step first‑order baselines on language‑model fine‑tuning tasks.

By Cristian McGee, El Houcine Bergou, Aritra Dutta
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Learning rate adaptive stochastic gradient descent optimization methods: numerical simulations for deep learning methods for partial differential equations and convergence analyses

arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).

By Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Adrian Riekert
arXiv AI
Jul 29

CIFNet: An Analytic Neural Learning Framework for Efficient and Calibrated Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv:2509. 11285v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) in deep neural networks is conventionally framed as an iterative gradient-based optimization problem, incurring high computational cost, hyperparameter sensitivity, and risk of catastrophic forgetting.

By Alejandro Dopico-Castro, Oscar Fontenla-Romero, Bertha Guijarro-Berdi\~nas, Amparo Alonso-Betanzos