arXiv:2609. 12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heavy-tailed empirical spectral densities of neural-network weight matrices are widely used as diagnostics of implicit self-regularization, but the step complexity of heavy-tail emergence remains poorly understood.
By Zongmin Liu
arXiv:2609.37787v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Adam is widely observed to remain stable even when the objective deviates significantly from global smoothness. Under the generalized smoothness framew...
By Ruinan Jin, Difei Cheng, Ling Chen, Jun Luo, Hao Zhou, Youzhi Zhang
The paper presents a theoretical study of Adam in non‑stationary stochastic optimization, distinguishing two regimes: Euclidean tracking under adaptive strong monotonicity and high‑probability projected stationarity for general smooth objectives. It derives finite‑time bounds that decompose into initialization, objective drift, first‑moment tracking error (β₁), and preconditioner perturbation (β₂), and characterizes burn‑in times for constant and step‑decay schedules. The analysis reveals a noise–drift tradeoff, showing that in noise‑dominated settings Adam’s adaptive mechanisms can improve guarantees, while in drift‑dominated settings they may worsen tracking, potentially making vanilla SGD preferable.
By Sharan Sahu, Abir Sarkar, Cameron J. Hogan, Martin T. Wells
arXiv:2607. 27383v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish the first convergence guarantees for the plain vector-form \emph{Adam} optimizer under heavy-tailed stochastic noise.
By Yijiang Pang
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.
By Ruoran Xu, Borong She, Xiaobo Jin, Qiufeng Wang
The paper presents empirical scaling laws for autoregressive language models, linking prediction loss to model size, data size, and compute, and investigates their theoretical basis using a teacher–student linear RNN framework. In this tractable setting, a stable latent linear RNN generates trajectories while a sketched linear recurrent student is trained via full‑batch WSD gradient descent on next‑token prediction. The study derives explicit approximation, optimization, and statistical scaling laws that depend on the sketch dimension, number of trajectories, and trajectory length, revealing how different power‑law exponents for innovation and initialization covariances affect the rates and crossovers between regimes.
By Ziyan Chen, Zhongzhu Zhou, Peilin Liu, Ding-Xuan Zhou