arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

DASH: Faster Shampoo via Batched Block Preconditioning and Efficient Inverse-Root Solvers

arXiv:2602. 02016v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Shampoo is one of the leading approximate second-order optimizers: a variant of it has won the MLCommons AlgoPerf competition, and it has been shown to produce models with lower activation outliers that are easier to compress.

By Ionut-Vlad Modoranu, Philip Zmushko, Erik Schultheis, Mher Safaryan, Dan Alistarh
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Blog: Survey of Optimizers

The article surveys recent neural‑network optimizers, noting that the field has moved beyond simple Adam variants to encompass matrix‑ and layer‑level designs, time‑policy horizons, and state representations that survive sharding and low‑precision computation. It categorizes optimizers along four axes—temporal estimation, update geometry, horizon management, and representation & systems—highlighting methods such as Muon, Shampoo, SOAP, and quantized states. The survey concludes that while matrix‑aware methods are a genuine advance, no single optimizer universally replaces AdamW, and performance depends on model scale, data‑to‑parameter ratio, batch size, schedule, partitioning, tuning budget, and target metric.

By Ruoran Xu