Towards Understanding Convergence and Generalization of AdamW

AdamW modifies Adam by adding a decoupled weight decay to decay network weights per training iteration. For adaptive algorithms, this decoupled weight decay does not affect specific optimization steps, and differs from the widely used $\ell _{2}$ -regularizer which changes optimization steps via changing the first- and second-order gradient moments. Despite its great practical success, for AdamW, its convergence behavior and generalization improvement over Adam and $\ell _{2}$ -regularized Adam ( $\ell _{2}$ -Adam) remain absent yet. To solve this issue, we prove the convergence of AdamW and justify its generalization advantages over Adam and $\ell _{2}$ -Adam. Specifically, AdamW provably converges but minimizes a dynamically regularized loss that combines vanilla loss and a dynamical regularization induced by decoupled weight decay, thus yielding different behaviors with Adam and $\ell _{2}$ -Adam. Moreover, on both general nonconvex problems and PŁ-conditioned problems, we establish stochastic gradient complexity of AdamW to find a stationary point. Such complexity is also applicable to Adam and $\ell _{2}$ -Adam, and improves their previously known complexity, especially for over-parametrized networks. Besides, we prove that AdamW enjoys smaller generalization errors than Adam and $\ell _{2}$ -Adam from the Bayesian posterior aspect. This result, for the first time, explicitly reveals the benefits of decoupled weight decay in AdamW. Experimental results validate our theory.