ASGO: Adaptive Structured Gradient Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: An, Kang, Liu, Yuxing, Pan, Rui, Ren, Yi, Ma, Shiqian, Goldfarb, Donald, Zhang, Tong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author An, Kang
Liu, Yuxing
Pan, Rui
Ren, Yi
Ma, Shiqian
Goldfarb, Donald
Zhang, Tong
author_facet An, Kang
Liu, Yuxing
Pan, Rui
Ren, Yi
Ma, Shiqian
Goldfarb, Donald
Zhang, Tong
contents Training deep neural networks is a structured optimization problem, because the parameters are naturally represented by matrices and tensors rather than by vectors. Under this structural representation, it has been widely observed that gradients are low-rank and Hessians are approximately block diagonal. These structured properties are crucial for designing efficient optimization algorithms, but are not utilized by many current popular optimizers like Adam. In this paper, we present a novel optimization algorithm ASGO that capitalizes on these properties by employing a preconditioner that is adaptively updated using structured gradients. By a fine-grained theoretical analysis, ASGO is proven to achieve superior convergence rates compared to existing structured gradient methods. Based on this convergence theory, we further demonstrate that ASGO can benefit from low-rank gradients and block diagonal Hessians. We also discuss practical modifications of ASGO and empirically verify ASGO's effectiveness on language model tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/infinity-stars/ASGO.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_20762
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ASGO: Adaptive Structured Gradient Optimization
An, Kang
Liu, Yuxing
Pan, Rui
Ren, Yi
Ma, Shiqian
Goldfarb, Donald
Zhang, Tong
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
Training deep neural networks is a structured optimization problem, because the parameters are naturally represented by matrices and tensors rather than by vectors. Under this structural representation, it has been widely observed that gradients are low-rank and Hessians are approximately block diagonal. These structured properties are crucial for designing efficient optimization algorithms, but are not utilized by many current popular optimizers like Adam. In this paper, we present a novel optimization algorithm ASGO that capitalizes on these properties by employing a preconditioner that is adaptively updated using structured gradients. By a fine-grained theoretical analysis, ASGO is proven to achieve superior convergence rates compared to existing structured gradient methods. Based on this convergence theory, we further demonstrate that ASGO can benefit from low-rank gradients and block diagonal Hessians. We also discuss practical modifications of ASGO and empirically verify ASGO's effectiveness on language model tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/infinity-stars/ASGO.
title ASGO: Adaptive Structured Gradient Optimization
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.20762