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SPSA

technique

1 creator use or recommend it

▲ 1 active in the last 90 days

1 use 1 mention
Last discussed Oct 2, 2026

Simultaneous Perturbation Stochastic Approximation, an optimization algorithm

Recently discussed in

What If We Stopped Using GPUs? | YC Paper Club
Francois Chaubard · Oct 2, 2026

What creators say

FC
Francois Chaubard
uses
Used for: Training a 1 billion parameter LSTM for next-token prediction without backpropagation Praised: Needs no gradients, can optimize 0-1 loss landscapes, and avoids local minima... vs: Performed best among every zero-order method in a textbook; finds the minimum...

"The learning procedure, the update rule that worked the best, is something called SPSA that pretty much no one knows about except James Spall and his students that invented this learning update rule... What's cool about this, the other property is..."

What If We Stopped Using GPUs? | YC Paper Club · ▶ 9:02 · Oct 2, 2026
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Y Combinator
mentioned
Used for: Alternative learning procedure to backpropagation vs: Alternative to backpropagation for neural network training

"I'm highly interested in SPSA, but if there's alternatives that I'm not aware of, please like recommend them"

5 Papers That Show Where AI Research Is Heading Right Now · ▶ 4:49 · Jun 12, 2026
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ml optimization algorithms zero order

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