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arXiv · 2111.08162

On a Conjecture Regarding the Adam Optimizer

Mohamed Akrout·Douglas Tweed
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Abstract

Why does the Adam optimizer work so well in deep-learning applications? Adam's originators, Kingma and Ba, presented a mathematical argument that was meant to help explain its success, but Bock and colleagues have since reported that a key piece is missing from that argument $-$ an unproven lemma which we will call Bock's conjecture. Here we show that this conjecture is false, but we prove a modified version of it $-$ a generalization of a result of Reddi and colleagues $-$ which can take its place in analyses of Adam.

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Mohamed Akrout, Douglas Tweed. 2021-11-16. On a Conjecture Regarding the Adam Optimizer. https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.08162

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