Rare Gate Disagreements Can Limit Plasticity: When Gradient Flow Mispredicts Finite-Batch SGD
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arXiv:2610. 11475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Population gradient flow is a common tool for reasoning about how neural networks adapt, including after pretraining.
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The paper presents a theoretical study of Adam in non‑stationary stochastic optimization, distinguishing two regimes: Euclidean tracking under adaptive strong monotonicity and high‑probability projected stationarity for general smooth objectives. It derives finite‑time bounds that decompose into initialization, objective drift, first‑moment tracking error (β₁), and preconditioner perturbation (β₂), and characterizes burn‑in times for constant and step‑decay schedules. The analysis reveals a noise–drift tradeoff, showing that in noise‑dominated settings Adam’s adaptive mechanisms can improve guarantees, while in drift‑dominated settings they may worsen tracking, potentially making vanilla SGD preferable.