Dual Averaging is Surprisingly Effective for Deep Learning Optimization

First-order stochastic optimization methods are currently the most widely used class of methods for training deep neural networks. However, the choice of the optimizer has become an ad-hoc rule that can significantly affect the performance. For instance, SGD with momentum (SGD+M) is typically used in computer vision (CV) and Adam is used for training transformer models for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Using the wrong method can lead to significant performance degradation. Inspired by the dual averaging algorithm, we propose Modernized Dual Averaging (MDA), an optimizer that is able to perform as well as SGD+M in CV and as Adam in NLP. Our method is not adaptive and is significantly simpler than Adam. We show that MDA induces a decaying uncentered L2-regularization compared to vanilla SGD+M and hypothesize that this may explain why it works on NLP problems where SGD+M fails.