arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 27

Hyperball May Not Be a Free Lunch

arXiv:2607. 22444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For scale-invariant deep networks, Hyperball-style optimizers have shown strong performance in large-scale training by fixing the norms of matrix-valued parameters and normalizing updates.

By Yihao Xiao, Jialong Sun, Zitian Gao, Zeming Wei, Chutian Wang, Ran Tao, Jiaye Teng, Bryan Dai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Towards Stability of Parameter-Free Optimization

arXiv:2405. 04376v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hyperparameter tuning, particularly the selection of an appropriate learning rate in adaptive gradient training methods, remains a challenge.

By Yijiang Pang, Shuyang Yu, Bao Hoang, Jiayu Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

AOS: Adaptive Optimizer Switching via Training-State Signals for Faster Convergence and Better Generalization

arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.

By Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Trust the Direction, Search the Step: Zero-and-First-Order Methods for LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces ZFO, a lightweight framework that separates direction selection from step-size determination in large‑scale neural network optimization. ZFO uses a trusted first‑order optimizer to pick a search direction and then performs only two additional objective evaluations to build a local curvature‑aware model, selecting an adaptive step within a bounded interval. The authors provide theoretical guarantees for reliable curvature estimation, near‑optimal step selection, and convergence to a stationary point, and demonstrate that ZFO improves optimization and final performance over fixed‑step first‑order baselines on language‑model fine‑tuning tasks.

By Cristian McGee, El Houcine Bergou, Aritra Dutta