Consider a [simple linear regression](../models/basics.md). We create some dummy data, calculate a loss, and backpropagate to calculate gradients for the parameters `W` and `b`.
An optimiser `update!` accepts a parameter and a gradient, and updates the parameter according to the chosen rule. We can also pass `opt` to our [training loop](training.md), which will update all parameters of the model in a loop. However, we can now easily replace `Descent` with a more advanced optimiser such as `ADAM`.
Flux's optimisers are built around a `struct` that holds all the optimiser parameters along with a definition of how to apply the update rule associated with it. We do this via the `apply!` function which takes the optimiser as the first argument followed by the parameter and its corresponding gradient.
The `Momentum` type will act as our optimiser in this case. Notice that we have added all the parameters as fields, along with the velocity which we will use as our state dictionary. Each parameter in our models will get an entry in there. We can now define the rule applied when this optimiser is invoked.
The `apply!` defines the update rules for an optimiser `opt`, given the parameters and gradients. It returns the updated gradients. Here, every parameter `x` is retrieved from the running state `v` and subsequently updates the state of the optimiser.
Flux internally calls on this function via the `update!` function. It shares the API with `apply!` but ensures that multiple parameters are handled gracefully.
Flux defines a special kind of optimiser simply called `Optimiser` which takes in arbitrary optimisers as input. Its behaviour is similar to the usual optimisers, but differs in that it acts by calling the optimisers listed in it sequentially. Each optimiser produces a modified gradient
that will be fed into the next, and the resultant update will be applied to the parameter as usual. A classic use case is where adding decays is desirable. Flux defines some basic decays including `ExpDecay`, `InvDecay` etc.