Silver Rate Is (Almost) Optimal for Gradient Descent
We study how far gradient descent (GD) can be accelerated by predetermined stepsizes in smooth convex optimization. Writing $p_{\mathrm{sil}}=\log_2(1+\sqrt{2})$, we prove an $Ω\left(n^{-p_{\mathrm{sil}}-O(\sqrt{\log\log n/\log n})}\right)$ non-anytime lower bound. In the anytime setting, every infinite schedule has infinitely many horizons with error $Ω\left(n^{-\frac{2p_{\mathrm{sil}}}{1+p_{\mathrm{sil}}}-O(\sqrt{\log\log n/\log n})}\right)$. Together with the silver-schedule upper bound [Altschuler and Parrilo, 2025] and the anytime upper bound [Zhang et al., 2025], our results determine the optimal polynomial convergence exponents in both settings.
| Authors | Yuhan Ye, Kaizhao Liu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | math.OC |
| Published | 8 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 September 2026 |
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