The paper introduces Stiefel Attention, which constrains the query and key projection matrices of transformers to the Stiefel manifold and optimizes them with a Riemannian Adam variant. It demonstrates that this approach yields steepest‑descent updates, is well‑conditioned, and preserves learned attention geometry during weight decay. Empirical results show significant accuracy gains on modular arithmetic grokking and CIFAR‑10 patches, with the improvement attributed to a step‑scale‑free update rule rather than equivariance or projector changes.
By Rub\'en Dar\'io Guerrero
A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation. Adam's per-coordinate preconditioner drifts along each symmetry orbit, which pulls the trajectory off the symmetry quotient where the optimization lives and blurs the singular-learning rate the quotient makes readable.
arXiv:2606. 29176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A deep network's loss is invariant to continuous symmetries of its parameters: the logit shift, the ReLU rescaling, the LayerNorm scale, the per-head attention rotation.
By Tejas Pradeep Shirodkar
arXiv:2607. 05872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory-efficient optimizers such as GaLore train large language models by projecting gradients onto a rank-r subspace recomputed every T steps, assuming this subspace is a slowly drifting object that can be tracked.
By Noel Thomas
arXiv:2607. 03998v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The local sharpness of the loss, the top Hessian eigenvalue $\lambda_1$, determines the largest stable gradient step, but measuring it normally requires Lanczos or Hessian-vector iterations.
By Ashmitha R, J\"org Frochte
arXiv:2608. 14803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A recent line of work recasts the post-memorization phase of grokking as constrained optimization: once a network interpolates the training set, weight decay drives a slow drift along the zero-loss manifold toward lower norm.
By Suvinava Basak