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AdGD

Implements AdGD (Adaptive Gradient Descent without Descent), a learning-rate-free step size that adapts to the local curvature using only gradients.

The method removes the need for a fixed learning rate, line search, or function evaluations. At each step it estimates a local Lipschitz constant from the most recent change in iterates and gradients, and sets the step size to the smaller of two quantities: one that prevents the step from growing too quickly, and one that prevents overshooting the local curvature.

\[ \begin{aligned} \gamma_t &= \min\left\{ \sqrt{1 + r_{t-1}}\,\gamma_{t-1},\ \frac{\lVert \theta_t - \theta_{t-1} \rVert}{2\,\lVert g_t - g_{t-1} \rVert} \right\} \\ r_t &= \frac{\gamma_t}{\gamma_{t-1}} \\ \theta_{t+1} &= \theta_t - \gamma_t\, g_t \end{aligned} \]

where \(\theta_t\) are the parameters at step \(t\), \(g_t = \nabla f(\theta_t)\) is the gradient, \(\gamma_t\) is the adaptive step size, and \(r_t\) is the ratio of consecutive step sizes (initialized \(r_0 = +\infty\), with arbitrary \(\gamma_0 > 0\)).

Reference: Yura Malitsky, Konstantin Mishchenko, "Adaptive Gradient Descent without Descent", ICML 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09529


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