Adaptive gradient descent on Riemannian manifolds and its applications to Gaussian variational inference

Jiyoung Park, Jaewook J. Suh, Bofan Wang, Anirban Bhattacharya, Shiqian Ma

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

We propose RAdaGD, a novel family of adaptive gradient descent methods on general Riemannian manifolds. RAdaGD adapts the step size parameter without line search, and includes instances that achieve a non-ergodic convergence guarantee, $f(x_k) - f(x_\star) \le \mathcal{O}(1/k)$, under local geodesic smoothness and generalized geodesic convexity. A core application of RAdaGD is Gaussian Variational Inference, where our method provides the first convergence guarantee in the absence of $L$-smoothness of the target log-density, under additional technical assumptions. We also investigate the empirical performance of RAdaGD in numerical simulations and demonstrate its competitiveness in comparison to existing algorithms.