{"paper":{"title":"A lower bound for stepsize-based acceleration of gradient descent","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG","stat.ML"],"primary_cat":"math.OC","authors_text":"Jianhao Ma, Yuxin Chen","submitted_at":"2026-08-11T03:06:59Z","abstract_excerpt":"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. Despite this progress, however, little was known about lower bounds for such methods beyond the classical $\\Omega(T^{-2})$ benchmark for general first-order methods. In this work, we present a new lower bound of $\\Omega(T^{-1.9319})$ for the last"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.10418","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.10418/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}