Adam$^+$: A Stochastic Method with Adaptive Variance Reduction

Abstract: Adam is a widely used stochastic optimization method for deep learning applications. While practitioners prefer Adam because it requires less parameter tuning, its use is problematic from a theoretical point of view since it may not converge. Variants of Adam have been proposed with provable convergence guarantee, but they tend not be competitive with Adam on the practical performance. In this paper, we propose a new method named Adam$^+$ (pronounced as Adam-plus). Adam$^+$ retains some of the key components of Adam but it also has several noticeable differences: (i) it does not maintain the moving average of second moment estimate but instead computes the moving average of first moment estimate at extrapolated points; (ii) its adaptive step size is formed not by dividing the square root of second moment estimate but instead by dividing the root of the norm of first moment estimate. As a result, Adam$^+$ requires few parameter tuning, as Adam, but it enjoys a provable convergence guarantee. Our analysis further shows that Adam$^+$ enjoys adaptive variance reduction, i.e., the variance of the stochastic gradient estimator reduces as the algorithm converges, hence enjoying an adaptive convergence. We also propose a more general variant of Adam$^+$ with different adaptive step sizes and establish their fast convergence rate. Our empirical studies on various deep learning tasks, including image classification, language modeling, and automatic speech recognition, demonstrate that Adam$^+$ significantly outperforms Adam and achieves comparable performance with best-tuned SGD and momentum SGD.