arXiv Machine Learning

Directional Curvature from Armijo Backtracking: A Low-Cost Sharpness Probe and a Calibration-Free Learning-Rate Safeguard for Adam

arXiv:2607. 03998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The local sharpness of the loss, the top Hessian eigenvalue $\lambda_1$, determines the largest stable gradient step, but measuring it normally requires Lanczos or Hessian-vector iterations.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Non-Euclidean Gradient Descent Operates at the Edge of Stability

arXiv:2603. 05002v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) is a phenomenon where the sharpness (largest eigenvalue) of the Hessian approaches and then hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$ during gradient descent (GD) with step size $\eta$.

By Rustem Islamov, Michael Crawshaw, Jeremy Cohen, Robert Gower
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 28

Dead-Direction Conditioners: Gauge-Equivariant Preconditioning for Deep Networks

A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation. Adam's per-coordinate preconditioner drifts along each symmetry orbit, which pulls the trajectory off the symmetry quotient where the optimization lives and blurs the singular-learning rate the quotient makes readable.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 3

Spectral Asymptotics of Neural Network Loss Landscapes: An Exact Decomposition of the Curvature Exponent

arXiv:2606. 02596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The curvature exponent $\alpha$ in $h_k \propto \sigma_k^\alpha$ -- governing how Hessian eigenvalues scale with gradient singular values -- varies systematically across layer types ($\alpha \approx 2$ for convolutions, $\approx 1$ for transformer attention, $< 1$ for MLP up-projections).

By Anherutowa Calvo