July 20263 min read
How fragile is acceleration?
Momentum buys a quadratic speedup — and pays for it in sensitivity to gradient errors. A guided tour of why that trade-off is a theorem, not an engineering accident, and how to design on the frontier instead of falling off it.
Companion to SIAM J. Optim. 2020 · Optim. Methods Softw. 2025 · Math. Oper. Res. 2025