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A Self-Attentive Meta-Optimizer with Group-Adaptive Learning Rates and Weight Decay

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MetaAdamW is a novel optimizer that uses a self-attention mechanism to dynamically adjust learning rates and weight decay per parameter group, outperforming AdamW on five tasks with up to 17.11% training time reduction or 11.08% performance improvement.

SourcearXiv Machine LearningAuthor: JiangBo Zhao, ZhaoXin Liu
A Self-Attentive Meta-Optimizer with Group-Adaptive Learning Rates and Weight Decay
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[2605.04055] A Self-Attentive Meta-Optimizer with Group-Adaptive Learning Rates and Weight Decay

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Computer Science > Machine Learning

arXiv:2605.04055 (cs)

[Submitted on 10 Apr 2026]

Title:A Self-Attentive Meta-Optimizer with Group-Adaptive Learning Rates and Weight Decay

Authors:JiangBo Zhao, ZhaoXin Liu

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Abstract:Adaptive optimizers like AdamW apply uniform hyperparameters across all parameter groups, ignoring heterogeneous optimization dynamics across layers and modules. We address this limitation by proposing MetaAdamW - a new optimizer that integrates a self-attention mechanism to dynamically modulate per-group learning rates and weight decay. The modulation factors are produced by a lightweight Transformer encoder that operates on statistical features (gradient norms, momentum norms, correlations) extracted from each parameter group. To train the attention module, we introduce a meta-learning objective that combines gradient alignment, loss decrease, and generalization gap. A key novel contribution is the extension of homoscedastic uncertainty weighting (HUW) with task-specific priorities that directly scale the regularization terms - enabling domain knowledge to guide automatic loss balancing. Extensive experiments on five diverse tasks-time series forecasting (ETT), language modeling (WikiText-2), machine translation (Multi30k), image classification (CIFAR-10), and sentiment analysis (IMDB) - demonstrate that MetaAdamW consistently outperforms the standard AdamW baseline in terms of validation loss, accuracy, or perplexity. Depending on the task, MetaAdamW either reduces overall training time (by up to 17.11%) or improves performance (by up to 11.08%) while introducing only moderate overhead; in some cases, it can also mitigate issues of insufficient convergence caused by premature early stopping. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of each component, including feature versions, grouping strategies, and the proposed priority-injected uncertainty weighting.

Subjects:

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

Cite as: arXiv:2605.04055 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2605.04055v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.04055

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From: JiangBo Zhao [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 02:56:01 UTC (84 KB)

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Key points

  • MetaAdamW employs a lightweight Transformer encoder to generate per-group adaptive learning rates and weight decay from statistical features like gradient norms and momentum norms.
  • It introduces a meta-learning objective combining gradient alignment, loss decrease, and generalization gap, and extends homoscedastic uncertainty weighting with task-specific priorities.
  • Validated on five tasks: time series forecasting, language modeling, machine translation, image classification, and sentiment analysis, consistently outperforming AdamW.
  • Reduces training time by up to 17.11% or improves performance by up to 11.08% with moderate overhead.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.