kraken:

GRADIENT_CLIP_NORM


It’s a bit strange, it should be exactly the same (statistically talking).
I would check group_weight, perhaps you can rewrite create_optimizers in function of get_optimizer to be sure you are doing the same in both cases.
Are you keeping the same validation set in both cases?
I mean, optimizer does nothing but iterating through parameters and setting new values.
    def step(self, closure=None):
        """Performs a single optimization step.

        Arguments:
            closure (callable, optional): A closure that reevaluates the model
                and returns the loss.
        """
        loss = None
        if closure is not None:
            with torch.enable_grad():
                loss = closure()

        for group in self.param_groups:
            weight_decay = group['weight_decay']
            momentum = group['momentum']
            dampening = group['dampening']
            nesterov = group['nesterov']

            for p in group['params']:
                if p.grad is None:
                    continue
                d_p = p.grad
                if weight_decay != 0:
                    d_p = d_p.add(p, alpha=weight_decay)
                if momentum != 0:
                    param_state = self.state[p]
                    if 'momentum_buffer' not in param_state:
                        buf = param_state['momentum_buffer'] = torch.clone(d_p).detach()
                    else:
                        buf = param_state['momentum_buffer']
                        buf.mul_(momentum).add_(d_p, alpha=1 - dampening)
                    if nesterov:
                        d_p = d_p.add(buf, alpha=momentum)
                    else:
                        d_p = buf

                p.add_(d_p, alpha=-group['lr'])

        return loss

So as you can see it’s nothing but a for loop.