Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Kopal, Jakub, Gregor, Michal, de Leon-Martinez, Santiago, Simko, Jakub
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09556
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866929678505213952
author Kopal, Jakub
Gregor, Michal
de Leon-Martinez, Santiago
Simko, Jakub
author_facet Kopal, Jakub
Gregor, Michal
de Leon-Martinez, Santiago
Simko, Jakub
contents Overshoot is a novel, momentum-based stochastic gradient descent optimization method designed to enhance performance beyond standard and Nesterov's momentum. In conventional momentum methods, gradients from previous steps are aggregated with the gradient at current model weights before taking a step and updating the model. Rather than calculating gradient at the current model weights, Overshoot calculates the gradient at model weights shifted in the direction of the current momentum. This sacrifices the immediate benefit of using the gradient w.r.t. the exact model weights now, in favor of evaluating at a point, which will likely be more relevant for future updates. We show that incorporating this principle into momentum-based optimizers (SGD with momentum and Adam) results in faster convergence (saving on average at least 15% of steps). Overshoot consistently outperforms both standard and Nesterov's momentum across a wide range of tasks and integrates into popular momentum-based optimizers with zero memory and small computational overhead.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_09556
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Overshoot: Taking advantage of future gradients in momentum-based stochastic optimization
Kopal, Jakub
Gregor, Michal
de Leon-Martinez, Santiago
Simko, Jakub
Machine Learning
Overshoot is a novel, momentum-based stochastic gradient descent optimization method designed to enhance performance beyond standard and Nesterov's momentum. In conventional momentum methods, gradients from previous steps are aggregated with the gradient at current model weights before taking a step and updating the model. Rather than calculating gradient at the current model weights, Overshoot calculates the gradient at model weights shifted in the direction of the current momentum. This sacrifices the immediate benefit of using the gradient w.r.t. the exact model weights now, in favor of evaluating at a point, which will likely be more relevant for future updates. We show that incorporating this principle into momentum-based optimizers (SGD with momentum and Adam) results in faster convergence (saving on average at least 15% of steps). Overshoot consistently outperforms both standard and Nesterov's momentum across a wide range of tasks and integrates into popular momentum-based optimizers with zero memory and small computational overhead.
title Overshoot: Taking advantage of future gradients in momentum-based stochastic optimization
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.09556