arXiv Machine Learning By Eric Gan

A Bifurcation Theory Framework for Gradient Descent on the Edge of Stability

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2606. 15551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) phenomenon, where gradient descent operates with sharpness exceeding the classical convergence threshold yet the loss decreases over long timescales, is ubiquitous in modern deep learning but remains poorly understood in realistic settings.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

The Road Taken: The Role of Optimizers at the Edge of Stability

The paper investigates the "edge of stability" phenomenon in deep learning, where Hessian eigenvalues remain stable above a classically predicted unstable threshold. It shows that many first‑order optimizers, including gradient descent, can violate this stability bound by up to a factor of 21.1, and that this deviation depends systematically on the optimizer used. The authors propose a new stability threshold based on the directional Hessian and gradient‑alignment score, which removes optimizer‑dependent offsets and offers consistent predictions while providing diagnostic tools to understand how optimizers balance temporal and spatial budgets.

By Jaerin Lee, Kyoung Mu Lee