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Gradient descent happens in a tiny subspace.arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.04754

19 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

19 Pith papers citing it
abstract

We show that in a variety of large-scale deep learning scenarios the gradient dynamically converges to a very small subspace after a short period of training. The subspace is spanned by a few top eigenvectors of the Hessian (equal to the number of classes in the dataset), and is mostly preserved over long periods of training. A simple argument then suggests that gradient descent may happen mostly in this subspace. We give an example of this effect in a solvable model of classification, and we comment on possible implications for optimization and learning.

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representative citing papers

Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

cs.LG · 2020-01-23 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

Empirical power-law scaling governs language model loss versus model size, data size, and compute, enabling optimal allocation of training compute.

AMUSE: Anytime Muon with Stable Gradient Evaluation

cs.LG · 2026-05-21 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

AMUSE is a new optimizer integrating Muon orthogonalization with Schedule-Free averaging via adaptive interpolation for schedule-free anytime training that improves Pareto frontiers on vision and LLM tasks.

GaLore: Memory-Efficient LLM Training by Gradient Low-Rank Projection

cs.LG · 2024-03-06 · conditional · novelty 7.0

GaLore performs full-parameter LLM training with up to 65.5% less optimizer memory by projecting gradients onto a low-rank subspace at each step, matching full-rank performance on LLaMA pre-training and RoBERTa fine-tuning.

Scaling Laws for Transfer

cs.LG · 2021-02-02 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Effective data transferred from pre-training to fine-tuning is described by a power law in model parameter count and fine-tuning dataset size, acting like a multiplier on the fine-tuning data.

TLoRA: Task-aware Low Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models

cs.CL · 2026-04-20 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

TLoRA jointly optimizes LoRA initialization via task-data SVD and sensitivity-driven rank allocation, delivering stronger results than standard LoRA across NLU, reasoning, math, code, and chat tasks while using fewer trainable parameters.

Grokking as Dimensional Phase Transition in Neural Networks

cs.LG · 2026-04-06 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Grokking occurs as the effective dimensionality of the gradient field transitions from sub-diffusive to super-diffusive at the onset of generalization, exhibiting self-organized criticality.

Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know

cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

On the Convergence Analysis of Muon

stat.ML · 2025-05-29 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Convergence analysis shows Muon outperforms gradient descent by exploiting low-rank structure in neural network Hessians.

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