Provable and Practical Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chu, Ya-Chi, Gao, Wenzhi, Ye, Yinyu, Udell, Madeleine
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Chu, Ya-Chi
Gao, Wenzhi
Ye, Yinyu
Udell, Madeleine
author_facet Chu, Ya-Chi
Gao, Wenzhi
Ye, Yinyu
Udell, Madeleine
contents This paper investigates the convergence properties of the hypergradient descent method (HDM), a 25-year-old heuristic originally proposed for adaptive stepsize selection in stochastic first-order methods. We provide the first rigorous convergence analysis of HDM using the online learning framework of [Gao24] and apply this analysis to develop new state-of-the-art adaptive gradient methods with empirical and theoretical support. Notably, HDM automatically identifies the optimal stepsize for the local optimization landscape and achieves local superlinear convergence. Our analysis explains the instability of HDM reported in the literature and proposes efficient strategies to address it. We also develop two HDM variants with heavy-ball and Nesterov momentum. Experiments on deterministic convex problems show HDM with heavy-ball momentum (HDM-HB) exhibits robust performance and significantly outperforms other adaptive first-order methods. Moreover, HDM-HB often matches the performance of L-BFGS, an efficient and practical quasi-Newton method, using less memory and cheaper iterations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Provable and Practical Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent
Chu, Ya-Chi
Gao, Wenzhi
Ye, Yinyu
Udell, Madeleine
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
This paper investigates the convergence properties of the hypergradient descent method (HDM), a 25-year-old heuristic originally proposed for adaptive stepsize selection in stochastic first-order methods. We provide the first rigorous convergence analysis of HDM using the online learning framework of [Gao24] and apply this analysis to develop new state-of-the-art adaptive gradient methods with empirical and theoretical support. Notably, HDM automatically identifies the optimal stepsize for the local optimization landscape and achieves local superlinear convergence. Our analysis explains the instability of HDM reported in the literature and proposes efficient strategies to address it. We also develop two HDM variants with heavy-ball and Nesterov momentum. Experiments on deterministic convex problems show HDM with heavy-ball momentum (HDM-HB) exhibits robust performance and significantly outperforms other adaptive first-order methods. Moreover, HDM-HB often matches the performance of L-BFGS, an efficient and practical quasi-Newton method, using less memory and cheaper iterations.
title Provable and Practical Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11229