Anon: Extrapolating Adaptivity Beyond SGD and Adam
TL;DR
Anon is proposed, an optimizer that achieves fully continuous adaptivity extrapolation across the entire real-number spectrum and demonstrates highly competitive and scalable performance among state-of-the-art element-wise optimizers on representative image classification, diffusion, and large language modeling tasks.
Abstract
Adaptive optimizers such as Adam and non-adaptive methods like SGD exhibit distinct generalization capabilities across different architectures. Prior tunable optimizers attempt to bridge this gap by strictly interpolating between SGD and Adam, effectively confining adaptivity within the 0-to-1 bound. However, this restricted interpolation is fundamentally insufficient: we reveal that optimal adaptivity often requires extrapolation, such as negative adaptivity for classical CNNs and adaptivity of at least one ($\gamma \geq 1$) for Transformers. Extrapolating adaptivity theoretically violates the strict non-decreasing pre-conditioner assumption, often leading to divergence in existing methods. To break this barrier, we propose Anon, an optimizer that achieves fully continuous adaptivity extrapolation across the entire real-number spectrum. To guarantee provable stability in these out-of-bound regimes, we introduce Incremental Delay Update (IDU), a novel mechanism that bypasses hard max-tracking strategies. We theoretically establish Anon's convergence in both convex and non-convex settings. Empirically, by exploring previously unreachable adaptivity landscapes, Anon demonstrates highly competitive and scalable performance among state-of-the-art element-wise optimizers on representative image classification, diffusion, and large language modeling tasks.
