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A new regret analysis for Adam-type algorithms
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 119:202-210, 2020.
Abstract
In this paper, we focus on a theory-practice gap for Adam and its variants (AMSGrad, AdamNC, etc.). In practice, these algorithms are used with a constant first-order moment parameter β1 (typically between 0.9 and 0.99). In theory, regret guarantees for online convex optimization require a rapidly decaying β1→0 schedule. We show that this is an artifact of the standard analysis, and we propose a novel framework that allows us to derive optimal, data-dependent regret bounds with a constant β1, without further assumptions. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our analysis on a wide range of different algorithms and settings.