AI engineering glossary · Calculus optimisation
What is line search?
Line search: A step-size selection procedure that, once a search direction is fixed, tests candidate step lengths along it until the objective decreases enough. Exact and backtracking variants are common in classical optimisers such as BFGS.
Line search: an example
Try step 1.0; if the loss does not fall enough, try 0.5, then 0.25, until it does.
Related terms
More Calculus optimisation terms
- Linear approximation
- Linear programming
- Lipschitz continuity
- Local minimum
- Loss landscape
- Mini-batch gradient descent
- Momentum
- Multivariable chain rule
Where you learn it
Line search is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.