arXiv Machine Learning By Henry Shugart, Jason M. Altschuler

Negative Stepsizes Make Gradient-Descent-Ascent Converge

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arXiv:2505. 01423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient computation of min-max problems is a central question in optimization, learning, games, and control.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

A lower bound for stepsize-based acceleration of gradient descent

arXiv:2608. 10418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that, for smooth convex optimization, plain gradient descent can be accelerated from its textbook convergence rate of $O(T^{-1})$ (where $T$ denotes the number of iterations) to $O\big(T^{-\log_2(1+\sqrt{2})}\big)$ using carefully designed stepsize schedules alone, without resorting to momentum or other algorithmic modifications.

By Jianhao Ma, Yuxin Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.

By Hasan Amin, Wei-Kai Chang, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv AI
Sep 10

HyCO: A Hybrid Neural Solver for Combinatorial Optimization

HyCO is a hybrid neural solver that combines a sequential reinforcement learning (RL) solver with a global diffusion model (DM) to tackle combinatorial optimization problems. The RL component builds an initial solution prefix, after which HyCO switches to a conditional DM to finish the remaining decisions. The authors provide a theoretical framework showing that this hybrid approach yields lower expected regret than either method alone, identify an optimal trigger step for the switch, and implement a lightweight adaptive trigger based on policy entropy and RL‑DM disagreement, achieving consistent performance gains across benchmarks.

By Yuheng Li, Di Yang, Haipeng Chen, Yanhai Xiong