Tobias Stollenwerk
2025
Better Embeddings with Coupled Adam
Felix Stollenwerk
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Tobias Stollenwerk
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs learn word representations that exhibit the undesirable yet poorly understood feature of anisotropy. In this paper, we argue that the second moment in Adam is a cause of anisotropic embeddings, and suggest a modified optimizer called Coupled Adam to mitigate the problem. Our experiments demonstrate that Coupled Adam significantly improves the quality of embeddings, while also leading to better upstream and downstream performance on large enough datasets.