arXiv:2605. 15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization.
By Lute Lillo, Nick Cheney
arXiv:2605. 22432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern deep learning commonly relies on AdamW with prescribed learning rate schedules, but recent works challenge both components: Schedule-Free optimization removes explicit schedules via iterate averaging, and Muon improves the update geometry by orthogonalizing momentum for matrix parameters.
By Jueun Kim, Baekrok Shin, Jihun Yun, Beomhan Baek, Minhak Song, Chulhee Yun
arXiv:2510. 03164v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning rate warm-up -- increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training -- has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood.
By Foivos Alimisis, Rustem Islamov, Aurelien Lucchi
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
ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.
By Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno
arXiv:2605. 29547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators.
By Ruoran Xu, Borong She, Xiaobo Jin, Qiufeng Wang