{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/dog-is-sgd-s-best-friend-a-parameter-free","title":"DoG is SGD's Best Friend: A Parameter-Free Dynamic Step Size Schedule","arxiv_id":"2302.12022","date":"2023-02-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["Maor Ivgi","Oliver Hinder","Yair Carmon"],"abstract":"We propose a tuning-free dynamic SGD step size formula, which we call Distance over Gradients (DoG). The DoG step sizes depend on simple empirical quantities (distance from the initial point and norms of gradients) and have no ``learning rate'' parameter. Theoretically, we show that a slight variation of the DoG formula enjoys strong parameter-free convergence guarantees for stochastic convex optimization assuming only \\emph{locally bounded} stochastic gradients. Empirically, we consider a broad range of vision and language transfer learning tasks, and show that DoG's performance is close to that of SGD with tuned learning rate. We also propose a per-layer variant of DoG that generally outperforms tuned SGD, approaching the performance of tuned Adam. A PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/formll/dog","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12022v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.12022v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"dog-is-sgd-s-best-friend-a-parameter-free","repo_url":"https://github.com/formll/dog","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"sgd","method_name":"SGD"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2302.12022","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2302.12022"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/formll/dog","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"940a2d495e5545c4","entry":"format_pgroup_dog_state","repo":"formll/dog","repo_kind":"official","path":"example.py","file_url":"https://github.com/formll/dog/blob/HEAD/example.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"940a2d495e5545c4"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"9cb5eb23e26edc4a","entry":"DoG","repo":"formll/dog","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/dog/dog.py","file_url":"https://github.com/formll/dog/blob/HEAD/src/dog/dog.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"9cb5eb23e26edc4a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}