Pith. sign in

REVIEW 20 cited by

Scalable Second Order Optimization for Deep Learning

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2002.09018 v2 pith:RL4CLPXQ submitted 2020-02-20 cs.LG math.OCstat.ML

Scalable Second Order Optimization for Deep Learning

classification cs.LG math.OCstat.ML
keywords optimizationdeeplearningmethodssecondtheoreticalcomparedfirst-order
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
read the original abstract

Optimization in machine learning, both theoretical and applied, is presently dominated by first-order gradient methods such as stochastic gradient descent. Second-order optimization methods, that involve second derivatives and/or second order statistics of the data, are far less prevalent despite strong theoretical properties, due to their prohibitive computation, memory and communication costs. In an attempt to bridge this gap between theoretical and practical optimization, we present a scalable implementation of a second-order preconditioned method (concretely, a variant of full-matrix Adagrad), that along with several critical algorithmic and numerical improvements, provides significant convergence and wall-clock time improvements compared to conventional first-order methods on state-of-the-art deep models. Our novel design effectively utilizes the prevalent heterogeneous hardware architecture for training deep models, consisting of a multicore CPU coupled with multiple accelerator units. We demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art on very large learning tasks such as machine translation with Transformers, language modeling with BERT, click-through rate prediction on Criteo, and image classification on ImageNet with ResNet-50.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 20 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Why Muon Outperforms Adam: A Curvature Perspective

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 7.0

    Muon outperforms Adam by reducing curvature penalty via lower Normalized Directional Sharpness, as shown via Taylor approximation on LLM training and proven on stylized quadratic problems with heterogeneous curvature.

  2. Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers

    math.OC 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    Proposes equivariant optimizers matched to the symmetry groups of embeddings, SwiGLU projections and MoE routers, with experiments showing consistent gains over AdamW on language model pre-training.

  3. DP-Muon: Differentially Private Optimization via Matrix-Orthogonalized Momentum

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DP-Muon adapts matrix-orthogonalized momentum optimization to differential privacy via per-matrix clipping and noise addition, with proofs of inherited privacy and optimization guarantees plus a bias-corrected version...

  4. Old Optimizer, New Norm: An Anthology

    cs.LG 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Optimizers like Adam reduce to steepest descent under particular norms, opening a design space of norm assignments tailored to layer roles.

  5. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion

    cs.CV 2022-09 accept novelty 7.0

    Optimizes a Neural Radiance Field via probability density distillation from a 2D diffusion model to produce text-conditioned 3D scenes viewable from any angle.

  6. LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    LoRA-Muon applies Muon's spectral steepest descent to low-rank factors with split weight decay, acting as a transferable proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo optimizers.

  7. Double Preconditioning (DoPr): Optimization for Test-Time Performance, not Validation Loss

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Double preconditioning (DoPr) improves downstream task performance in test-time feedback settings without consistent gains in validation loss.

  8. Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers

    math.OC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Proposes equivariant optimizer updates matched to layer symmetries for embeddings, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE routers, with reported gains in validation loss and training stability on several language model architectures.

  9. Runtime-Orchestrated Second-Order Optimization for Scalable LLM Training

    cs.DC 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Asteria is a runtime system that enables second-order optimization for LLMs by dynamically distributing optimizer state across GPU, CPU, and NVMe while using asynchronous inverse-root computations and bounded-stalenes...

  10. Error whitening: Why Gauss-Newton outperforms Newton

    cs.LG 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    Gauss-Newton descent whitens errors by projecting Newton directions or gradients onto the tangent space, replacing JJ^T with the identity and removing parameterization distortions that affect Newton descent.

  11. Dimension-Free Saddle-Point Escape in Muon

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Muon achieves dimension-free saddle-point escape through non-linear spectral shaping, resolvent calculus, and structural incoherence, yielding an algebraically dimension-free escape bound.

  12. Convergence Analysis of Newton's Method for Neural Networks in the Overparameterized Limit

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    In the infinite-width limit, regularized Newton's method for neural networks converges exponentially to global minimizers with uniform rates across the frequency spectrum using the Newton neural tangent kernel.

  13. Convergence Analysis of Newton's Method for Neural Networks in the Overparameterized Limit

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Regularized Newton's method for neural networks converges exponentially to zero loss with uniform spectral rates in the infinite-width limit via a derived Newton neural tangent kernel.

  14. Pro-KLShampoo: Projected KL-Shampoo with Whitening Recovered by Orthogonalization

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Pro-KLShampoo projects KL-Shampoo preconditioners to a spike-and-flat parametric form on an r-dimensional subspace and recovers the full algebraic preconditioner via orthogonalization, outperforming KL-Shampoo on GPT-...

  15. Low-rank Orthogonalization for Large-scale Matrix Optimization with Applications to Foundation Model Training

    cs.LG 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Proposes low-rank orthogonalization and derives low-rank Muon and MSGD variants that outperform standard Muon on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining while providing iteration complexity bounds.

  16. FOAM: Frequency and Operator Error-Based Adaptive Damping Method for Reducing Staleness-Oriented Error for Shampoo

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    FOAM adaptively controls damping and update frequency in Shampoo based on staleness-oriented error approximation to cut wall-clock time while preserving convergence.

  17. Reparametrizing Shampoo and SOAP for Subspace Basis Updates and BFloat16 Storage

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Reparametrization of Shampoo/SOAP preconditioners enables BFP16 storage and partial subspace basis updates, reducing compute and memory while improving low-precision performance.

  18. Accelerated Gradient Descent for Faster Convergence with Minimal Overhead

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    CT-AGD accelerates first-order optimization in deep learning by using finite-difference curvature estimates and noise-mitigation heuristics, achieving equivalent accuracy with 33% fewer training epochs and overhead co...

  19. Position: agentic AI orchestration should be Bayes-consistent

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Agentic AI orchestration should apply Bayesian principles for belief maintenance, updating from interactions, and utility-based action selection.

  20. Navigating LLM Valley: From AdamW to Memory-Efficient and Matrix-Based Optimizers

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    This survey organizes LLM optimizer literature into categories and argues the field is shifting toward rigorous, multi-factor comparisons of convergence, memory, stability, and complexity.