What is: Demon?

Decaying Momentum, or Demon, is a stochastic optimizer motivated by decaying the total contribution of a gradient to all future updates. By decaying the momentum parameter, the total contribution of a gradient to all future updates is decayed. A particular gradient term $g\_{t}$ contributes a total of $\eta\sum\_{i}\beta^{i}$ of its "energy" to all future gradient updates, and this results in the geometric sum, $\sum^{\infty}\_{i=1}\beta^{i} = \beta\sum^{\infty}\_{i=0}\beta^{i} = \frac{\beta}{\left(1-\beta\right)}$. Decaying this sum results in the Demon algorithm. Letting $\beta\_{init}$ be the initial $\beta$; then at the current step $t$ with total $T$ steps, the decay routine is given by solving the below for $\beta\_{t}$:

$\frac{\beta\_{t}}{\left(1-\beta\_{t}\right)} = \left(1-t/T\right)\beta\_{init}/\left(1-\beta\_{init}\right)$

Where $\left(1-t/T\right)$ refers to the proportion of iterations remaining. Note that Demon typically requires no hyperparameter tuning as it is usually decayed to $0$ or a small negative value at time $T$. Improved performance is observed by delaying the decaying. Demon can be applied to any gradient descent algorithm with a momentum parameter.