The author admits they "kinda stopped reading this paper" after noticing that they only used one hyperparameter configuration, which I agree is a flaw in the paper, but that's not an excuse for sloppy treatment of the rest of the paper. (It would however, be an excuse to ignore it entirely.)

In particular, the assumption that |a_k| ≈ 0 initially is incorrect, since in the original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.01628 the a_k are distances from one vector to multiple other vectors, and they're unlikely to be initialized in such a way that the distance is anywhere close to zero. So while the gradient divergence near 0 could certainly be a problem, it doesn't have to be as fatal as the author seems to think it is.