arXiv Machine Learning

Learning from the Descent Direction: Adaptive Gradient Descent under One-Sided H\"older Regularity

arXiv:2607. 22906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study adaptive gradient descent for continuously differentiable, possibly nonconvex objectives under one-sided H\"older regularity.

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
Jun 18

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

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