We completely classify cyclic steepest descent (CSD) on strictly convex quadratics whose Hessian has exactly two distinct eigenvalues. At the beginning of each cycle CSD recomputes an exact steepest-descent stepsize and reuses it for updates. For every , write with and spectral projectors . For nonzero spectral blocks, let at a cycle boundary. The exact projective dynamics is . Hence the nonzero equal-norm cone is precisely the nonterminating exceptional set: there the convergence is -linear with factor , whereas every other nonterminating initialization is -superlinear and one-eigenspace initializations terminate in one step. The exceptional cone has Lebesgue measure zero, so -superlinear convergence holds almost everywhere in this two-spectrum class. The main results of this paper were obtained through a generative-AI workflow using OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol, Anthropic Claude Fable 5, and OpenAI GPT-6 Astra. Further details appear in the disclosure at the end of the paper.

生成讲解博客的中文版本

生成AI智能校验的中文版本