Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

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 1201.5885 v1 pith:PB3SJY33 submitted 2012-01-27 physics.data-an physics.comp-ph

Improvements to the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm for nonlinear least-squares minimization

classification physics.data-an physics.comp-ph
keywords algorithmconvergenceimprovementsinitialleast-squareslevenberg-marquardtwhenfunction
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

When minimizing a nonlinear least-squares function, the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm can suffer from a slow convergence, particularly when it must navigate a narrow canyon en route to a best fit. On the other hand, when the least-squares function is very flat, the algorithm may easily become lost in parameter space. We introduce several improvements to the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm in order to improve both its convergence speed and robustness to initial parameter guesses. We update the usual step to include a geodesic acceleration correction term, explore a systematic way of accepting uphill steps that may increase the residual sum of squares due to Umrigar and Nightingale, and employ the Broyden method to update the Jacobian matrix. We test these changes by comparing their performance on a number of test problems with standard implementations of the algorithm. We suggest that these two particular challenges, slow convergence and robustness to initial guesses, are complimentary problems. Schemes that improve convergence speed often make the algorithm less robust to the initial guess, and vice versa. We provide an open source implementation of our improvements that allow the user to adjust the algorithm parameters to suit particular needs.

discussion (0)

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

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

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

  1. Higher-Order Geometric Updates for Levenberg-Marquardt Method via Riemann Normal Coordinates

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    RNC-LM extends geodesic-accelerated Levenberg-Marquardt to arbitrary-order Riemann normal coordinate corrections, reusing the LM matrix factorization for all orders and achieving large speedups on PINN and potential-f...

  2. Inferring Unreported Measurement Uncertainties via Information Geometry in Astrophysics

    astro-ph.IM 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    FIMER reconstructs effective measurement uncertainties in heterogeneous astrophysical data via weighted Fisher information geometry combined with detector-motivated priors such as Poisson and extreme-value distributions.

  3. GATO: GPU-Accelerated and Batched Trajectory Optimization for Scalable Edge Model Predictive Control

    cs.RO 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    GATO is a new batched GPU trajectory optimization solver that achieves real-time MPC throughput with 18-21x speedups over CPU baselines for tens to low-hundreds of simultaneous solves.

  4. Natural Selection in the Wake of Catastrophe

    q-bio.PE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Post-catastrophe mean fitness relaxes as 1/t proportional to coupled traits; adaptation on measured E. coli landscapes follows Levenberg-Marquardt optimization instead of gradient ascent.

  5. Extending OpenKIM with an Uncertainty Quantification Toolkit for Molecular Modeling

    physics.comp-ph 2022-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Introduces UQ extension to KLIFF using PTMCMC to quantify uncertainty from parameter variation and IP functional form inadequacy, demonstrated on Stillinger-Weber potential for silicon.