arXiv:2605. 18694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process.
By Zijian Liu
arXiv:2609.08277v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study zeroth-order optimization of non-convex functions with the aid of directional hints, which are cheap but potentially inaccurate approximations...
By Alexander Ryabchenko, Jian Qian, Wenlong Mou
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:2606. 02948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curvature adaptivity is a classical theme in online optimization: for convex Lipschitz losses, adaptive methods interpolate between the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for general convex losses and $O(\log T)$ regret under strong convexity.
By Moses Charikar, Chirag Pabbaraju, Ambuj Tewari
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:2511. 19716v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise.
By Mitchell Scott, Tianshi Xu, Ziyuan Tang, Alexandra Pichette-Emmons, Qiang Ye, Yousef Saad, Yuanzhe Xi
arXiv:2608. 12009v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bregman proximal stochastic gradient (BPSG) methods bring variance-reduced composite optimization to objectives whose geometry is poorly captured by Euclidean smoothness.
By Chenhan Jin, Shengze Xu, Binghui Xie, Kaiwen Zhou, Fan Jia, James Cheng, Tieyong Zeng
arXiv:2606. 06722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The training of neural networks often entails objective functions that are not globally $L$-smooth.
By Leonardo Galli, Curtis Fox, Wiebke Bartolomaeus, Mark Schmidt, Holger Rauhut
arXiv:2602. 12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data.
By Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu
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
arXiv:2607. 12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cooldown phase of a warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning-rate schedule, now a default in large-model pretraining, lowers the final training loss in some settings and does nothing in others.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
arXiv:2509. 14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning.
By Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Aujol, J\'er\'emie Bigot, Camille Castera