Skip to content

AvaGrad

Implements AvaGrad, an adaptive method that decouples the learning rate from adaptability.

\[ \begin{aligned} m_t &= \beta_1 m_{t-1} + (1 - \beta_1) g_t \\ \eta_t &= \frac{1}{\sqrt{v_{t-1}} + \epsilon} \\ \gamma_t &= \frac{\sqrt{d}}{\lVert \eta_t \rVert_2} \\ \theta_t &= \theta_{t-1} - \alpha \gamma_t \, \eta_t \odot m_t \\ v_t &= \beta_2 v_{t-1} + (1 - \beta_2) g_t^2 \end{aligned} \]

The per-parameter adaptive rate \(\eta_t\) depends on the second moment from the previous step, and the global scalar \(\gamma_t\) normalizes it by its root-mean-square over the \(d\) parameters in the group. This normalization cancels the dependence of the update on the scale of the second moment, so the learning rate \(\alpha\) and the adaptability \(\epsilon\) can be tuned independently.

Note: following the official implementation, the second moment is Adam-style

bias-corrected before use (absent from the paper's Algorithm 2): the update uses \(\hat{v}_{t-1} = v_{t-1} / (1 - \beta_2^{t-1})\) and the \(\gamma_t\) normalization uses the current-step debias \(1 - \beta_2^{t}\).

Reference: Pedro Savarese, David McAllester, Sudarshan Babu, Michael Maire, "Domain-Independent Dominance of Adaptive Methods", CVPR 2021. https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01823


Back to the Canon