Gradient Regularized Natural Gradients

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Dash, Satya Prakash, Abdi, Hossein, Pan, Wei, Kaski, Samuel, Sun, Mingfei
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Dash, Satya Prakash
Abdi, Hossein
Pan, Wei
Kaski, Samuel
Sun, Mingfei
author_facet Dash, Satya Prakash
Abdi, Hossein
Pan, Wei
Kaski, Samuel
Sun, Mingfei
contents Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how the training dynamics of second-order optimizers can benefit from GR. In this work, we propose Gradient-Regularized Natural Gradients (GRNG), a family of scalable second-order optimizers that integrate explicit gradient regularization with natural gradient updates. Our framework introduces two frequentist algorithms: Regularized Explicit Natural Gradient (RENG), which utilizes double backpropagation to explicitly minimize the gradient norm, and Regularized Implicit Natural Gradient (RING), which incorporates regularization implicitly into the update direction. We also propose a Bayesian variant based on a Regularized-Kalman formulation that eliminates the need for FIM inversion entirely. We establish convergence guarantees for GRNG, showing that gradient regularization improves stability and enables convergence to global minima. Empirically, we demonstrate that GRNG consistently enhances both optimization speed and generalization compared to first-order methods (SGD, AdamW) and second-order baselines (K-FAC, Sophia), with strong results on vision and language benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_18420
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gradient Regularized Natural Gradients
Dash, Satya Prakash
Abdi, Hossein
Pan, Wei
Kaski, Samuel
Sun, Mingfei
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Gradient regularization (GR) has been shown to improve the generalizability of trained models. While Natural Gradient Descent has been shown to accelerate optimization in the initial phase of training, little attention has been paid to how the training dynamics of second-order optimizers can benefit from GR. In this work, we propose Gradient-Regularized Natural Gradients (GRNG), a family of scalable second-order optimizers that integrate explicit gradient regularization with natural gradient updates. Our framework introduces two frequentist algorithms: Regularized Explicit Natural Gradient (RENG), which utilizes double backpropagation to explicitly minimize the gradient norm, and Regularized Implicit Natural Gradient (RING), which incorporates regularization implicitly into the update direction. We also propose a Bayesian variant based on a Regularized-Kalman formulation that eliminates the need for FIM inversion entirely. We establish convergence guarantees for GRNG, showing that gradient regularization improves stability and enables convergence to global minima. Empirically, we demonstrate that GRNG consistently enhances both optimization speed and generalization compared to first-order methods (SGD, AdamW) and second-order baselines (K-FAC, Sophia), with strong results on vision and language benchmarks.
title Gradient Regularized Natural Gradients
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18420