Physics-Inspired Optimizers beyond the Edge of Stability: Period-Two Orbits and Delayed Instability
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2606. 09929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical reservoir computing harnesses nonlinear mechanical dynamics but, by convention, freezes the substrate and trains only a linear readout, presuming the substrate is not usefully trainable.
arXiv:2606. 18080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient descent in deep learning may operate at the edge of stability (EoS), a regime in which the largest eigenvalue of the loss Hessian hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$, where $\eta$ is the learning rate.
arXiv:2609.01034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The central flow of Cohen et al. (2025) is an empirically accurate continuous-time model of gradient descent at the edge of stability in deep learning,...
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.
arXiv:2607. 04993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many phenomena of deep learning are dynamical: they concern not only which minima exist, but how gradient descent reaches, avoids, or selects among them.
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.