For some extra reference: #5843 (comment) and some few comments downstream.

I'd like to give this a shot! As it's my first time contributing to DL4J, do you have any advice/suggestions for me?

@AlexDBlack

Are we sure about creating new classes for Padam?
As it's just a slight modification over Amsgrad, will it not be better if we provide support for Padam via AmsGrad by simply adding additional fields wherever required?

Yeah, I'm ok with a separate class (extending AMSGrad if that makes sense).
Though we might end up with a little redundancy, I think I'd prefer a dedicated class for it for usability reasons - i.e., it'll be easier to find as a dedicated class rather than as an option in AMSGrad.

@AlexDBlack

Hi, I added the required classes. It is safe to merge:
Unified Commit

@saudet

I did not add the predicate for the range of param, instead logged a warning. Will need your help with predicates.

Haven't requested a pull as I haven't tested the code yet. Couldn't build the project (tried a lot of things) using IntelliJ on Macos. Can someone point me to a thorough readme/guide for the same?

@achalagarwal It's name is "Preconditions" actually, just do something like this:

Preconditions.checkArgument(bias != null, "LayerNorm: Use constructor without bias argument if bias is null / not available.");

https://github.com/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j/blob/master/nd4j/nd4j-backends/nd4j-api-parent/nd4j-api/src/main/java/org/nd4j/linalg/api/ops/impl/transforms/custom/LayerNorm.java#L47

Use Maven on the command line with mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip before trying it in an IDE.

The build was successful but I had to skip a couple of projects due to network issues (HTTP requests failed)

On Ubuntu:
mvn clean install -Dmaven.test.skip -pl '!:deeplearning4j-dataimport-solrj, !:deeplearning4j-modelexport-solr

@AlexDBlack

Now, how do you suggest I validate the correctness of Padam? Do you want me to build a model and replicate results from a publication? This will take a lot of time. Are there relevant tests for the linalg/learning modules? I could not find any.

Commit

cc: @saudet

@achalagarwal we have updater tests here, adding to that would be good:
https://github.com/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j/blob/master/deeplearning4j/deeplearning4j-core/src/test/java/org/deeplearning4j/nn/updater/TestUpdaters.java

We'll carefully review the implementation too once you've opened a pull request. That should be good enough I think.