Papers › On the adequacy of untuned warmup for adaptive optimization
On the adequacy of untuned warmup for adaptive optimization
Jerry Ma, Denis Yarats
Adaptive optimization algorithms such as Adam are widely used in deep learning. The stability of such algorithms is often improved with a warmup schedule for the learning rate. Motivated by the difficulty of choosing and tuning warmup schedules, recent work proposes automatic variance rectification of Adam's adaptive learning rate, claiming that this rectified approach ("RAdam") surpasses the vanilla Adam algorithm and reduces the need for expensive tuning of Adam with warmup. In this work, we refute this analysis and provide an alternative explanation for the necessity of warmup based on the magnitude of the update term, which is of greater relevance to training stability. We then provide some "rule-of-thumb" warmup schedules, and we demonstrate that simple untuned warmup of Adam performs more-or-less identically to RAdam in typical practical settings. We conclude by suggesting that practitioners stick to linear warmup with Adam, with a sensible default being linear warmup over 2 / (1 - β₂) training iterations.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | ImageNet | ResNet-50 | Top 1 Accuracy | 72.1% | #1000 of 1060 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | Transformer (Adaptive inputs) | Validation perplexity | 19.5 | #86 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Machine Translation | WMT2016 English-German | Transformer | BLEU score | 26.7 | #6 of 12 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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