activity
20242026
collaborators

12 papers

stat.ML2026

Understanding and Improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization

Wu Lin, Scott C. Lowe, Felix Dangel +3

Shampoo and its efficient variant, SOAP, employ structured second-moment estimations and have shown strong performance for training neural networks (NNs). In practice, however, Sha…

cs.LG2026

Better Hessians Matter: Studying the Impact of Curvature Approximations in Influence Functions

Steve Hong, Runa Eschenhagen, Bruno Mlodozeniec +1

Influence functions offer a principled way to trace model predictions back to training data, but their use in deep learning is hampered by the need to invert a large, ill-condition…

cs.LG2026

Clarifying Shampoo: Adapting Spectral Descent to Stochasticity and the Parameter Trajectory

Runa Eschenhagen, Anna Cai, Tsung-Hsien Lee +1

Optimizers leveraging the matrix structure in neural networks, such as Shampoo and Muon, are more data-efficient than element-wise algorithms like Adam and Signum. While in specifi…

cs.LG2025

Purifying Shampoo: Investigating Shampoo's Heuristics by Decomposing its Preconditioner

Runa Eschenhagen, Aaron Defazio, Tsung-Hsien Lee +2

The recent success of Shampoo in the AlgoPerf contest has sparked renewed interest in Kronecker-factorization-based optimization algorithms for training neural networks. Despite it…

cs.LG2025

Kronecker-factored Approximate Curvature (KFAC) From Scratch

Felix Dangel, Bálint Mucsányi, Tobias Weber +1

Kronecker-factored approximate curvature (KFAC) is arguably one of the most prominent curvature approximations in deep learning. Its applications range from optimization to Bayesia…

cs.LG2025

Benchmarking Neural Network Training Algorithms

George E. Dahl, Frank Schneider, Zachary Nado +22

Training algorithms, broadly construed, are an essential part of every deep learning pipeline. Training algorithm improvements that speed up training across a wide variety of workl…