arXiv:2402.11215v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The choice of batch size in minibatch stochastic gradient optimization is critical for both optimization and generalization performance in large-sc...
By Tim Tsz-Kit Lau, Han Liu, Mladen Kolar
arXiv:2602. 11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries.
By Jichu Li, Xuan Tang, Difan Zou
The paper introduces Batched SGD, a variant that groups online samples into epochs and performs a single update per epoch using a low‑variance gradient estimate. This batching approach allows a straightforward high‑probability analysis without restrictive assumptions or auxiliary sequences, yielding near‑optimal rates for both strongly convex and non‑convex objectives under standard smoothness and sub‑Gaussian noise conditions. The authors also extend the method to federated learning, providing the first high‑probability guarantees with logarithmic communication complexity, linear speedup in the number of agents, and robustness to data heterogeneity.
By Feng Zhu, Robert W. Heath Jr., Aritra Mitra
arXiv:2606. 12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks.
By Benjamin Leblanc, Louis-Jacob Lebel, Teddy Kana, Richard Kamel
arXiv:2607. 16261v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern optimizers combine gradients from the current mini-batch with historical optimization state, such as momentum or adaptive moments.
By Apostolos Avranas
The paper investigates why the orthogonal optimiser Muon outperforms Adam in large language model pretraining by analysing the spectral properties of Transformer loss landscapes. It finds that Muon’s momentum buffers exhibit an anisotropic spectral profile with a volatile head and a tolerant bulk, enabling larger effective step sizes. Building on this insight, the authors propose Spectral‑Aware Muon (SAMuon) and a lightweight variant, which adjust the bulk scaling while keeping the head unchanged, achieving 13–24 % fewer training tokens than Muon without extra FLOPs.
By Xiaodong Wu, Wenyi Yu, Chao Zhang, Philip Woodland
arXiv:2605. 18528v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized.
By Jiayu Zhang, Tianyi Lin
arXiv:2602. 10204v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce MVN-Grad (Momentum on Variance-Normalized Gradients), an Adam-style optimizer that improves stability and performance by combining two complementary ideas: variance-based normalization and momentum applied after normalization.
By Francisco Patitucci, Aryan Mokhtari
arXiv:2606. 30455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there.
By Muhammad Hamza (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur), Ayush Goel (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.
By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort
arXiv:2602. 05704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the limitations of gradient methods, and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in particular, is a central challenge in learning theory.
By Daniel Barzilai, Ohad Shamir
arXiv:2507. 01598v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Muon, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW.
By Naoki Sato, Hiroki Naganuma, Hideaki Iiduka