arXiv:2505. 13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics.
arXiv:2605. 29547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators.
arXiv:2602. 00334v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (mSGD) relies on a fixed momentum coefficient shared across all parameters, failing to account for the heterogeneous structure of modern loss landscapes.
arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).
The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.
The paper investigates how normalization makes neural networks scale‑invariant, creating a feedback loop between learning‑rate schedules and weight decay that controls the effective step size of the optimizer. It derives an exact discrete‑time law showing that a single scalar quantity captures all schedule and decay effects, with norm growth providing a self‑quenching counter‑force that defines a sharp boundary between contraction‑ and expansion‑dominated regimes. Through exact analysis of a normalized regression model and experiments on MLPs, CNNs, GPT‑2, and various datasets, the authors demonstrate that constant learning rates with weight decay are intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics, and that adaptive optimizers exhibit weaker stabilization under normalization. "whyItMatters":"The study provides a precise, actionable rule for controlling training dynamics and schedule design in modern deep learning by isolating a single governing quantity for scale‑invariant optimization."
arXiv:2606. 05326v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the dynamics of gradient descent in the Edge of Stability regime, where the learning rate is large enough to induce persistent oscillations in the loss and the sharpness.
ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.
arXiv:2608. 16760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable optimization is central to neural network (NN) training, yet Adam, the default optimizer for modern LLMs, rests on a fragile foundation.
arXiv:2604. 08742v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adam is widely used, but its convergence theory remains incomplete even in the deterministic full-batch setting because momentum and adaptive preconditioning are tightly coupled.
arXiv:2608. 09523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural network (DNN) training with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants achieves strong empirical performance, yet classical optimization theory does not fully explain this success.
arXiv:2301. 06308v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains.
The paper introduces Anon, an optimizer that extends adaptivity beyond the traditional bounds of SGD and Adam by allowing extrapolation across the entire real-number spectrum. It addresses the limitations of prior tunable optimizers that only interpolate between 0 and 1 adaptivity, showing that optimal adaptivity can require negative values for CNNs or values greater than one for Transformers. Anon incorporates Incremental Delay Update (IDU) to maintain provable stability and demonstrates competitive performance on image classification, diffusion, and large language modeling tasks.