arXiv Machine Learning

Stability Annealing Selects the Implicit Bias of Smoothed Sign Descent: A Rate-Indexed Barrier Path on Separable Data

arXiv:2607. 06013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive gradient methods can favor max-margin separators that differ from gradient descent, yet a fixed positive numerical stability constant eventually changes the update geometry again.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

The Road Taken: The Role of Optimizers at the Edge of Stability

The paper investigates the "edge of stability" phenomenon in deep learning, where Hessian eigenvalues remain stable above a classically predicted unstable threshold. It shows that many first‑order optimizers, including gradient descent, can violate this stability bound by up to a factor of 21.1, and that this deviation depends systematically on the optimizer used. The authors propose a new stability threshold based on the directional Hessian and gradient‑alignment score, which removes optimizer‑dependent offsets and offers consistent predictions while providing diagnostic tools to understand how optimizers balance temporal and spatial budgets.

By Jaerin Lee, Kyoung Mu Lee