UBC Master's Thesis on Adam Optimizer Wins National AI Association Award

MarkSchmidtUBC · x · 2026-08-20

UBC MSc graduate Alan Milligan has received the Best Master’s Thesis Award from the Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association (CAIAC). His thesis focuses on the Adam algorithm, a key optimizer used to train models like ChatGPT. The research investigates how different structures within optimization problems increase difficulty and impact Adam's performance, finding that Adam can exploit structures that stump classical algorithms.

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