Pith. sign in

REVIEW 4 cited by

Dimension-adapted Momentum Outscales SGD

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

arxiv 2505.16098 v1 pith:BXOA6LOW submitted 2025-05-22 stat.ML cs.LGmath.OC

Dimension-adapted Momentum Outscales SGD

classification stat.ML cs.LGmath.OC
keywords momentumscalingcomplexitydanadataexponentsmodelstochastic
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

We investigate scaling laws for stochastic momentum algorithms with small batch on the power law random features model, parameterized by data complexity, target complexity, and model size. When trained with a stochastic momentum algorithm, our analysis reveals four distinct loss curve shapes determined by varying data-target complexities. While traditional stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGD-M) yields identical scaling law exponents to SGD, dimension-adapted Nesterov acceleration (DANA) improves these exponents by scaling momentum hyperparameters based on model size and data complexity. This outscaling phenomenon, which also improves compute-optimal scaling behavior, is achieved by DANA across a broad range of data and target complexities, while traditional methods fall short. Extensive experiments on high-dimensional synthetic quadratics validate our theoretical predictions and large-scale text experiments with LSTMs show DANA's improved loss exponents over SGD hold in a practical setting.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Phases of Muon: When Muon Eclipses SignSGD

    math.OC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    On power-law covariance least squares problems, SignSVD (Muon) and SignSGD (Adam proxy) show three phases of relative performance depending on data exponent α and target exponent β.

  2. Sharp Capacity Scaling of Spectral Optimizers in Learning Associative Memory

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Muon achieves higher storage capacity than SGD and matches Newton's method in one-step recovery rates for associative memory under power-law distributions, while saturating at larger critical batch sizes and showing f...

  3. Theory of Optimal Learning Rate Schedules and Scaling Laws for a Random Feature Model

    cond-mat.dis-nn 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    In a random feature model, optimal SGD learning-rate schedules are polynomial decay in the easy phase and warmup-stable-decay in the hard phase, outperforming constant or simple power-law schedules and transferring di...

  4. Compute Efficiency and Serial Runtime Tradeoffs for Stochastic Momentum Methods

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Lower bounds establish that heavy-ball momentum extends the compute-efficient batch-size window by sqrt(kappa) over SGD in linear regression, with accelerated SGD showing spectrum-dependent CE-serial runtime tradeoffs.