The Road Taken: The Role of Optimizers at the Edge of Stability

arXiv:2608.18415v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The edge of stability refers to a phenomenon in deep learning with gradient-based optimizers where the Hessian eigenvalues of the loss remain stable above a threshold that the classical descent lemma predicts to be unstable. Previous works formulate the edge of stability with respect to the maximum Hessian eigenvalue and the learning rate. However, we observe that many first-order methods, including gradient descent, significantly violate the stability bound predicted by these theories by a factor as large as imes 21.1. Moreover, this deviation turns out to be systematic and highly dependent on the underlying optimizer, which is not captured by previous formulations. This calls for a new formulation of the stability threshold, which we derive from the directional Hessian and the gradient-alignment score with respect to the actual update taken by the optimizer, rather than the maximum curvature mode. Our new formulation of the realized edge of stability not only removes optimizer-dependent offsets and provides more consistent predictions of the stability threshold, but also introduces new diagnostic tools that reveal the unique role of the optimizer in actively balancing between the temporal and spatial budgets in first-order optimization.

Related

• Edge of Stability Selectively Shapes Learning Across the Data Distribution
• Directional Curvature from Armijo Backtracking: A Low-Cost Sharpness Probe and a Calibration-Free Learning-Rate Safeguard for Adam
• Towards Understanding Adam Convergence on Highly Degenerate Polynomials

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-08-20