REVIEW 7 cited by
The Geometry of Sign Gradient Descent
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
The Geometry of Sign Gradient Descent
read the original abstract
Sign-based optimization methods have become popular in machine learning due to their favorable communication cost in distributed optimization and their surprisingly good performance in neural network training. Furthermore, they are closely connected to so-called adaptive gradient methods like Adam. Recent works on signSGD have used a non-standard "separable smoothness" assumption, whereas some older works study sign gradient descent as steepest descent with respect to the $\ell_\infty$-norm. In this work, we unify these existing results by showing a close connection between separable smoothness and $\ell_\infty$-smoothness and argue that the latter is the weaker and more natural assumption. We then proceed to study the smoothness constant with respect to the $\ell_\infty$-norm and thereby isolate geometric properties of the objective function which affect the performance of sign-based methods. In short, we find sign-based methods to be preferable over gradient descent if (i) the Hessian is to some degree concentrated on its diagonal, and (ii) its maximal eigenvalue is much larger than the average eigenvalue. Both properties are common in deep networks.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
When and Why SignSGD Outperforms SGD: A Theoretical Study Based on $\ell_1$-norm Lower Bounds
SignSGD provably beats SGD by a factor of d under sparse noise via matched ℓ1-norm upper and lower bounds, with an equivalent result for Muon on matrices, and this predicts faster GPT-2 pretraining.
-
A unified convergence theory for adaptive first-order methods in the nonconvex case, including AdaNorm, full and diagonal AdaGrad, Shampoo and Muo
A unified stochastic convergence theory is developed for adaptive preconditioned first-order methods including AdaGrad variants, Shampoo, and Muon in nonconvex optimization.
-
Training Deep Learning Models with Norm-Constrained LMOs
Scion is a new stochastic LMO-based optimizer family that unifies existing methods, supports unconstrained problems, and delivers hyperparameter transferability plus speedups on nanoGPT training.
-
Beyond $\ell_2$-norm and $\ell_\infty$-norm: A Curvature-Inspired $\ell_p$-Norm Scheme for Deep Neural Networks
Introduces curvature-motivated dynamic lp-norm SGD and momentum SGD variants claimed to achieve O(T^{-1/2}) nonconvex convergence and superior generalization on CIFAR and ImageNet benchmarks.
-
Optimizer-Model Consistency: Full Finetuning with the Same Optimizer as Pretraining Forgets Less
Full finetuning with the pretraining optimizer reduces forgetting compared to other optimizers or LoRA while achieving comparable new-task performance.
-
Open Problem: Is AdamW Effective Under Heavy-Tailed Noise?
The paper poses whether AdamW converges under heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise and supplies a weighted-metric benchmark plus a corridor lower-bound showing how denominator memory can obscure large gradients.
-
Zero-order Parameter-free Optimization for LMO-based Methods: Novel Approach for Efficient Fine-tuning
AdaNAGED combines zeroth-order gradient-free training, automatic parameter adaptation, and LMO-based non-Euclidean geometry with claimed convergence guarantees, demonstrated on OPT-1.3B fine-tuning.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.