The sparse implementation of this algorithm (used when the gradient is an IndexedSlices object, typically because of tf.gather or an embedding lookup in the forward pass) does apply momentum to variable slices even if they were not used in the forward pass (meaning they have a gradient equal to zero). Momentum decay (beta1) is also applied to the entire momentum accumulator. This means that the sparse behavior is equivalent to the dense behavior (in contrast to some momentum implementations which ignore momentum unless a variable slice was actually used).