arXiv:2605. 18694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process.
By Zijian Liu
arXiv:2609.08277v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study zeroth-order optimization of non-convex functions with the aid of directional hints, which are cheap but potentially inaccurate approximations...
By Alexander Ryabchenko, Jian Qian, Wenlong Mou
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
arXiv:2606. 02948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Curvature adaptivity is a classical theme in online optimization: for convex Lipschitz losses, adaptive methods interpolate between the optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for general convex losses and $O(\log T)$ regret under strong convexity.
By Moses Charikar, Chirag Pabbaraju, Ambuj Tewari
arXiv:2402.11215v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: The choice of batch size in minibatch stochastic gradient optimization is critical for both optimization and generalization performance in large-sc...
By Tim Tsz-Kit Lau, Han Liu, Mladen Kolar
arXiv:2511. 19716v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise.
By Mitchell Scott, Tianshi Xu, Ziyuan Tang, Alexandra Pichette-Emmons, Qiang Ye, Yousef Saad, Yuanzhe Xi