Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Huang, Tianjin, Wang, Zhangyang, Hu, Haotian, Zhang, Zhenyu, Jin, Gaojie, Li, Xiang, Shen, Li, Shang, Jiaxing, Chen, Tianlong, Li, Ke, Liu, Lu, Wen, Qingsong, Liu, Shiwei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17055
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866918525206003712
author Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Zhangyang
Hu, Haotian
Zhang, Zhenyu
Jin, Gaojie
Li, Xiang
Shen, Li
Shang, Jiaxing
Chen, Tianlong
Li, Ke
Liu, Lu
Wen, Qingsong
Liu, Shiwei
author_facet Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Zhangyang
Hu, Haotian
Zhang, Zhenyu
Jin, Gaojie
Li, Xiang
Shen, Li
Shang, Jiaxing
Chen, Tianlong
Li, Ke
Liu, Lu
Wen, Qingsong
Liu, Shiwei
contents Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence. Widely used safeguards such as gradient clipping mitigate these failures but require threshold tuning and indiscriminately truncate large updates. We propose GradientStabilizer, a lightweight, drop-in gradient transform that preserves the instantaneous gradient direction while replacing the update magnitude with a statistically stabilized estimate derived from running gradient-norm statistics. We prove that the resulting stabilized magnitude is uniformly bounded on spike steps, independent of the spike size, and show how this boundedness controls optimizer state evolution in adaptive methods. Across LLM pre-training (FP16), quantization-aware pre-training (FP4), ImageNet classification, reinforcement learning, and time-series forecasting, GradientStabilizer consistently improves training stability, widens stable learning-rate regions, and reduces divergence relative to clipping-based baselines, even substantially reducing Adam's sensitivity to weight-decay strength. Code will be released soon.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17055
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GradientStabilizer:Fix the Norm, Not the Gradient
Huang, Tianjin
Wang, Zhangyang
Hu, Haotian
Zhang, Zhenyu
Jin, Gaojie
Li, Xiang
Shen, Li
Shang, Jiaxing
Chen, Tianlong
Li, Ke
Liu, Lu
Wen, Qingsong
Liu, Shiwei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence. Widely used safeguards such as gradient clipping mitigate these failures but require threshold tuning and indiscriminately truncate large updates. We propose GradientStabilizer, a lightweight, drop-in gradient transform that preserves the instantaneous gradient direction while replacing the update magnitude with a statistically stabilized estimate derived from running gradient-norm statistics. We prove that the resulting stabilized magnitude is uniformly bounded on spike steps, independent of the spike size, and show how this boundedness controls optimizer state evolution in adaptive methods. Across LLM pre-training (FP16), quantization-aware pre-training (FP4), ImageNet classification, reinforcement learning, and time-series forecasting, GradientStabilizer consistently improves training stability, widens stable learning-rate regions, and reduces divergence relative to clipping-based baselines, even substantially reducing Adam's sensitivity to weight-decay strength. Code will be released soon.
title GradientStabilizer:Fix the Norm, Not the Gradient
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17055