arXiv AI By Yiman Fong, Heng Yang

Adam at the Edge of Stability: Adaptive Feedback, Provable Oscillation, and Gradient Reversal

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arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

How Far is Adam from Natural Gradient Descent?

The paper investigates how Adam’s update rule relates to natural gradient descent (NGD) by treating Adam as a diagonal empirical Fisher approximation with additional factors such as diagonal truncation, empirical label substitution, and temporal lag. Using a scale‑invariant metric, the authors quantify Adam’s geometric deviation from true NGD across four loss landscapes—well‑conditioned and ill‑conditioned linear regression, logistic regression, and a small neural network—finding that deviation is low in well‑conditioned settings but can reach about 10³ in ill‑conditioned or non‑convex scenarios. Despite higher geometric drift correlating with slower early optimization, Adam still achieves low final loss, and the improved empirical Fisher (iEF) yields more stable trajectories than the standard empirical Fisher (EF).

By Vihaan Paka-Hegde