Enhance the numerical stability of the Cautious Optimizer#2658
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rwightman merged 1 commit intohuggingface:mainfrom Jan 29, 2026
Merged
Enhance the numerical stability of the Cautious Optimizer#2658rwightman merged 1 commit intohuggingface:mainfrom
rwightman merged 1 commit intohuggingface:mainfrom
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Enhance numerical stability of the Cautious Optimizer.
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Hi rwightman, this PR aims to fix potential numerical errors.
Motivation:
$\langle \xi, g^\bot \rangle = \langle \xi^\bot, g^\bot \rangle$ ,$\xi$ denotes the masked update, this approach always guarantees that the update direction is descending, which is consistent with the design philosophy of cautious optimizers.
Applying a coordinate-wise mask in the tangent space may cause the masked tangent vector to slightly deviate from the tangent space. Here, we follow AdamP’s design philosophy by keeping the masked update strictly within the tangent space, which avoids potential numerical instability. Since
where
Modifications:
Only one additional line of code is introduced, reusing an existing operation:
perturb -= p_n * view_func(p_n * perturb).sum(dim=1).reshape(expand_size)This is simply an extra reprojection step, but it helps prevent numerical instability.