Equivariance Breaks the Learning Rate
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arXiv:2606. 25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object.
The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.
arXiv:2608. 05136v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent on a factored model $W = UV^\top$ is implicitly biased toward low-rank solutions, while Adam, starting from the same small initialization, is not.
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.
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:2607. 19771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon and related matrix-sign optimizers are increasingly used to pre-train large language models, but their effect on the internal geometry of individual weight matrices is not well understood.