arXiv:2602. 02016v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shampoo is one of the leading approximate second-order optimizers: a variant of it has won the MLCommons AlgoPerf competition, and it has been shown to produce models with lower activation outliers that are easier to compress.
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:2607. 26247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tunes large pretrained models at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but its performance depends strongly on how the adapters are initialized.
arXiv:2606. 00542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shampoo-style optimizers approximate gradient covariance matrices using Kronecker-factored structures.
The article surveys recent neural‑network optimizers, noting that the field has moved beyond simple Adam variants to encompass matrix‑ and layer‑level designs, time‑policy horizons, and state representations that survive sharding and low‑precision computation. It categorizes optimizers along four axes—temporal estimation, update geometry, horizon management, and representation & systems—highlighting methods such as Muon, Shampoo, SOAP, and quantized states. The survey concludes that while matrix‑aware methods are a genuine advance, no single optimizer universally replaces AdamW, and performance depends on model scale, data‑to‑parameter ratio, batch size, schedule, partitioning, tuning budget, and target metric.
arXiv:2608.29448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) often face ill-conditioned objectives that limit high-accuracy training. Dense quasi-Newton methods improve...
The paper presents an exact, information‑theoretic analysis of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants, showing that a preconditioned SGD step corresponds to a posterior‑mean update in a Gaussian Bayes model. It decomposes one‑step regret into an intrinsic‑time cost and a change in comparator information, extending this split to an identity for the objective itself. The framework links convex convergence, saddle‑point escape, flatness‑generalization trade‑offs, learning‑rate schedules, adaptive optimizers, and various SGD variants, and it is validated on synthetic and real training runs, revealing how different optimizers achieve the same training loss through distinct step characteristics.
arXiv:2606. 13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures.
arXiv:2508. 21022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Subsampled natural gradient descent (SNG) has been used to enable high-precision scientific machine learning, but standard analyses based on stochastic preconditioning fail to provide insight into realistic small-sample settings.
The paper studies how different optimizers perform as training duration (overtraining) increases, focusing on matrix‑preconditioned methods (Muon, SOAP) and a momentum‑scheduled method (ADANA) compared to AdamW. Across models ranging from 51M to 253M parameters and overtraining factors up to 256×, the authors find that optimal learning‑rate schedules, weight‑decay coefficients, and memory settings shift with horizon, and that ADANA consistently outperforms AdamW, especially with log‑time weight decay and momentum cooldown. Muon and SOAP maintain roughly constant token‑efficiency advantages, with SOAP potentially improving at the highest overtraining levels.
arXiv:2602. 02877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies optimization for a family of problems termed $\textbf{compositional entropic risk minimization}$, in which each data's loss is formulated as a Log-Expectation-Exponential (Log-E-Exp) function.
arXiv:2510.13210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We compare Ising ({-1, +1}) and QUBO ({0, 1}) encodings for Boltzmann machine learning under controlled protocols that fix the sampler, optimizer,...