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Poster

Structured Inverse-Free Natural Gradient Descent: Memory-Efficient & Numerically-Stable KFAC

Wu Lin · Felix Dangel · Runa Eschenhagen · Kirill Neklyudov · Agustinus Kristiadi · Richard E Turner · Alireza Makhzani

Hall C 4-9 #906
[ ] [ Paper PDF ]
[ Poster
Thu 25 Jul 2:30 a.m. PDT — 4 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Second-order methods such as KFAC can be useful for neural net training. However, they are often memory-inefficient since their preconditioning Kronecker factors are dense, and numerically unstable in low precision as they require matrix inversion or decomposition. These limitations render such methods unpopular for modern mixed-precision training. We address them by (i) formulating an inverse-free KFAC update and (ii) imposing structures in the Kronecker factors, resulting in structured inverse-free natural gradient descent (SINGD). On modern neural networks, we show that SINGD is memory-efficient and numerically robust, in contrast to KFAC, and often outperforms AdamW even in half precision. Our work closes a gap between first- and second-order methods in modern low-precision training.

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