Connections between Schedule-Free Optimizers, AdEMAMix, and Accelerated SGD Variants

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Main Authors: Morwani, Depen, Vyas, Nikhil, Zhang, Hanlin, Kakade, Sham
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Morwani, Depen
Vyas, Nikhil
Zhang, Hanlin
Kakade, Sham
author_facet Morwani, Depen
Vyas, Nikhil
Zhang, Hanlin
Kakade, Sham
contents Recent advancements in deep learning optimization have introduced new algorithms, such as Schedule-Free optimizers, AdEMAMix, MARS and Lion which modify traditional momentum mechanisms. In a separate line of work, theoretical acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in noise-dominated regime has been achieved by decoupling the momentum coefficient from the current gradient's weight. In this paper, we establish explicit connections between these two lines of work. We substantiate our theoretical findings with preliminary experiments on a 150m language modeling task. We find that AdEMAMix, which most closely resembles accelerated versions of stochastic gradient descent, exhibits superior performance. Building on these insights, we introduce a modification to AdEMAMix, termed Simplified-AdEMAMix, which maintains the same performance as AdEMAMix across both large and small batch-size settings while eliminating the need for two different momentum terms. The code for Simplified-AdEMAMix is available on the repository: https://github.com/DepenM/Simplified-AdEMAMix/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02431
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Connections between Schedule-Free Optimizers, AdEMAMix, and Accelerated SGD Variants
Morwani, Depen
Vyas, Nikhil
Zhang, Hanlin
Kakade, Sham
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advancements in deep learning optimization have introduced new algorithms, such as Schedule-Free optimizers, AdEMAMix, MARS and Lion which modify traditional momentum mechanisms. In a separate line of work, theoretical acceleration of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in noise-dominated regime has been achieved by decoupling the momentum coefficient from the current gradient's weight. In this paper, we establish explicit connections between these two lines of work. We substantiate our theoretical findings with preliminary experiments on a 150m language modeling task. We find that AdEMAMix, which most closely resembles accelerated versions of stochastic gradient descent, exhibits superior performance. Building on these insights, we introduce a modification to AdEMAMix, termed Simplified-AdEMAMix, which maintains the same performance as AdEMAMix across both large and small batch-size settings while eliminating the need for two different momentum terms. The code for Simplified-AdEMAMix is available on the repository: https://github.com/DepenM/Simplified-AdEMAMix/.
title Connections between Schedule-Free Optimizers, AdEMAMix, and Accelerated SGD Variants
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02431