Manifold constrained steepest descent

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Yang, Kaiwei, Lai, Lexiao
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Yang, Kaiwei
Lai, Lexiao
author_facet Yang, Kaiwei
Lai, Lexiao
contents Norm-constrained linear minimization oracle (LMO)-based optimizers such as spectral gradient descent and Muon are attractive in large-scale learning, but extending them to manifold-constrained problems is nontrivial and often leads to nested-loop schemes that solve tangent-space subproblems iteratively. We propose \emph{Manifold Constrained Steepest Descent} (MCSD), a single-loop framework for optimization over manifolds that selects a norm-induced steepest-descent direction via an LMO applied to the Riemannian gradient, and then returns to the manifold via projection. Under standard smoothness assumptions, we establish convergence guarantees for MCSD and a stochastic momentum variant. We further introduce \emph{SPEL}, the spectral-norm specialization of MCSD on the Stiefel manifold, which admits scalable implementations via fast matrix sign computations. Experiments on PCA, orthogonality-constrained CNNs, and manifold-constrained LLM adapter tuning demonstrate improved stability and competitive performance relative to standard Riemannian baselines and existing manifold-aware LMO methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_21487
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Manifold constrained steepest descent
Yang, Kaiwei
Lai, Lexiao
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
Norm-constrained linear minimization oracle (LMO)-based optimizers such as spectral gradient descent and Muon are attractive in large-scale learning, but extending them to manifold-constrained problems is nontrivial and often leads to nested-loop schemes that solve tangent-space subproblems iteratively. We propose \emph{Manifold Constrained Steepest Descent} (MCSD), a single-loop framework for optimization over manifolds that selects a norm-induced steepest-descent direction via an LMO applied to the Riemannian gradient, and then returns to the manifold via projection. Under standard smoothness assumptions, we establish convergence guarantees for MCSD and a stochastic momentum variant. We further introduce \emph{SPEL}, the spectral-norm specialization of MCSD on the Stiefel manifold, which admits scalable implementations via fast matrix sign computations. Experiments on PCA, orthogonality-constrained CNNs, and manifold-constrained LLM adapter tuning demonstrate improved stability and competitive performance relative to standard Riemannian baselines and existing manifold-aware LMO methods.
title Manifold constrained steepest descent
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21487