The Hidden Ratio in Adam: Stable Structure, Compression, and Sign Dynamics
Yihe Zhou, Tongtian Zhu, Yingxiao Huo, Satya Prakash Dash, Can Wang, Samuel Kaski, Mingfei Sun
Abstract
Adam is the default optimizer for training modern deep neural networks, yet its adaptive behavior remains poorly understood due to the complex interaction between its first- and second-moment exponential moving averages (EMAs). We study Adam in the tied-$β$ regime, where the two EMA decay rates are equal, and show that its adaptive dynamics can be expressed through a transformed ratio with approximately scale-stable behavior. Empirically, this transformed ratio exhibits a stable, heavy-tailed distribution across tasks, model scales, and training stages, in contrast to the variability of raw moment magnitudes. This empirical stability has both practical and conceptual consequences. First, we derive a recurrence for the transformed ratio, yielding a reparameterization of Adam that replaces the second moment with a compressible state. Leveraging its stable distribution, we show that a fixed 4-bit codebook is sufficient in our experiments to store this state without auxiliary scaling, achieving performance competitive with full-precision Adam. Second, the transformed ratio view clarifies Adam's connection to sign-based methods: Adam reduces to sign-based momentum modulated by the transformed ratio, and replacing it with a constant recovers Signum as a limiting case. This perspective further provides a simple rule for transferring learning rates between the two methods. Together, these results suggest that tied-$β$ Adam admits a simple and approximately stable ratio structure underlying its adaptive behavior and demonstrate its utility for both analysis and efficient implementation.