FOAM: Frequency and Operator Error-Based Adaptive Damping Method for Reducing Staleness-Oriented Error for Shampoo

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Nam, Kyunghun, Ahn, Sumyeong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Nam, Kyunghun
Ahn, Sumyeong
author_facet Nam, Kyunghun
Ahn, Sumyeong
contents Shampoo is attracting considerable attention for its superior performance on large-scale optimization benchmarks; yet it faces a significant practical bottleneck: the prohibitive computational overhead of matrix inversion. To mitigate this, practitioners typically rely on stale preconditioner updates, creating a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and optimization fidelity. In this work, we provide a theoretical study of staleness through the complementary lenses of convergence and stability. While staleness improves computational efficiency, it inherently degrades performance and introduces numerical instability. Crucially, we identify that damping, acting as a numerical stabilizer, can effectively suppress these negative effects. Guided by this analysis, we propose FOAM, an adaptive algorithm that stabilizes training by dynamically controlling both the damping factor and the eigendecomposition frequency based on an approximation of the staleness-oriented error. Experimental results demonstrate that FOAM reduces wall-clock time compared to standard Shampoo while maintaining robust convergence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2606_02365
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FOAM: Frequency and Operator Error-Based Adaptive Damping Method for Reducing Staleness-Oriented Error for Shampoo
Nam, Kyunghun
Ahn, Sumyeong
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Shampoo is attracting considerable attention for its superior performance on large-scale optimization benchmarks; yet it faces a significant practical bottleneck: the prohibitive computational overhead of matrix inversion. To mitigate this, practitioners typically rely on stale preconditioner updates, creating a fundamental trade-off between computational efficiency and optimization fidelity. In this work, we provide a theoretical study of staleness through the complementary lenses of convergence and stability. While staleness improves computational efficiency, it inherently degrades performance and introduces numerical instability. Crucially, we identify that damping, acting as a numerical stabilizer, can effectively suppress these negative effects. Guided by this analysis, we propose FOAM, an adaptive algorithm that stabilizes training by dynamically controlling both the damping factor and the eigendecomposition frequency based on an approximation of the staleness-oriented error. Experimental results demonstrate that FOAM reduces wall-clock time compared to standard Shampoo while maintaining robust convergence.
title FOAM: Frequency and Operator Error-Based Adaptive Damping Method for Reducing Staleness-Oriented Error for Shampoo
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02365