Part of International Conference on Representation Learning 2025 (ICLR 2025) Conference
Nikolaos Tsilivis, Gal Vardi, Julia Kempe
We study the implicit bias of the family of steepest descent algorithms with infinitesimal learning rate, including gradient descent, sign gradient descent and coordinate descent, in deep homogeneous neural networks. We prove that an algorithm-dependent geometric margin increases during training and characterize the late-stage bias of the algorithms. In particular, we define a generalized notion of stationarity for optimization problems and show that the algorithms progressively reduce a (generalized) Bregman divergence, which quantifies proximity to such stationary points of a margin-maximization problem. We then experimentally zoom into the trajectories of neural networks optimized with various steepest descent algorithms, highlighting connections to the implicit bias of Adam.