Pith. sign in

REVIEW 15 cited by

A Distributed Data-Parallel PyTorch Implementation of the Distributed Shampoo Optimizer for Training Neural Networks At-Scale

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2309.06497 v1 pith:YMDGPZLL submitted 2023-09-12 cs.LG cs.DCcs.MSmath.OC

classification cs.LGcs.DCcs.MSmath.OC
keywords trainingimplementationdistributednetworksneuralperformancepytorchshampoo
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

Signed reviews

No signed human review yet.

0 comments
read the original abstract

Shampoo is an online and stochastic optimization algorithm belonging to the AdaGrad family of methods for training neural networks. It constructs a block-diagonal preconditioner where each block consists of a coarse Kronecker product approximation to full-matrix AdaGrad for each parameter of the neural network. In this work, we provide a complete description of the algorithm as well as the performance optimizations that our implementation leverages to train deep networks at-scale in PyTorch. Our implementation enables fast multi-GPU distributed data-parallel training by distributing the memory and computation associated with blocks of each parameter via PyTorch's DTensor data structure and performing an AllGather primitive on the computed search directions at each iteration. This major performance enhancement enables us to achieve at most a 10% performance reduction in per-step wall-clock time compared against standard diagonal-scaling-based adaptive gradient methods. We validate our implementation by performing an ablation study on training ImageNet ResNet50, demonstrating Shampoo's superiority over standard training recipes with minimal hyperparameter tuning.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 15 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. On The Concurrence of Layer-wise Preconditioning Methods and Provable Feature Learning

    cs.LG 2025-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    For two feature-learning models with anisotropic inputs, KFAC-style layer-wise preconditioning provably recovers features better than SGD and matches ridge regression in the single-index case.

  2. Muon Meets Mamba: Spectral Optimization for State Space Models

    cs.LG 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On Mamba-2 130M, Muon on the output projection alone gives lower validation loss and better token efficiency than Muon on the input projection or on both, across corpora and budgets.

  3. OneShot: Index-in-Ranking with Neural Scoring for Large-Scale Retrieval

    cs.IR 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    OneShot trains hierarchical item codebooks jointly with the ranking loss, enabling nonlinear neural scoring in billion-scale retrieval and reporting +20% recall, 10x fewer dense-ranked items, and live Instagram gains.

  4. PoLoRA: A Preconditioned Orthogonalized LoRA Optimizer

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A preconditioned, product-aware spectral optimizer for LoRA reaches Adam's final loss in 1.2–1.7x fewer steps on instruction-tuning, with ~3% per-step overhead.

  5. Muse: Representation Geometry of Muon Beyond Normalized Momentum

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The matrix shape given to Muon's orthonormalization step is a genuine optimizer axis: square-ish reshapes match native Muon, skinnier reshapes interpolate toward normalized SGD with momentum.

  6. MatrixFSDP: communication-free matrix optimizers under ZeRO-3 parameter sharding

    cs.DC 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MatrixFSDP places whole 2D weight matrices on single ZeRO-3 owner ranks so matrix optimizers run locally without optimizer-step collectives, preserving ZeRO-3 memory while achieving up to 54.6x optimizer-step speedup ...

  7. Understanding and Improving Shampoo and SOAP via Kullback-Leibler Minimization

    stat.ML 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A KL-divergence view of Shampoo and SOAP yields KL-Shampoo and KL-SOAP, with KL-Shampoo outperforming both baselines in LLM pretraining without Adam grafting.

  8. DHO$_2$: Accelerating Distributed Hybrid Order Optimization via Model Parallelism and ADMM

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DHO2 distributes FOSI's Hessian eigenvector computation with model parallelism and an ADMM-like update, claiming lower per-GPU memory and faster time-to-solution in distributed DNN training.

  9. Spectral-factorized Positive-definite Curvature Learning for NN Training

    stat.ML 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    The paper derives a Riemannian update rule for the spectral factors of a positive-definite preconditioner, making arbitrary matrix roots fast and numerically stable for low-precision NN training.

  10. SWAN: SGD with Normalization and Whitening Enables Stateless LLM Training

    cs.LG 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SWAN, a stateless optimizer combining gradient normalization and whitening, matches or beats Adam on LLaMA pretraining through 1.3B parameters with roughly half the memory and reported 2x token efficiency.

  11. Memory-Efficient 4-bit Preconditioned Stochastic Optimization

    cs.LG 2024-12 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A 4-bit Shampoo optimizer that quantizes Cholesky factors and adds error feedback matches 32-bit Shampoo's accuracy at a fraction of the memory.

  12. MARS: Unleashing the Power of Variance Reduction for Training Large Models

    cs.LG 2024-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    MARS combines STORM-style variance reduction with preconditioned updates and reports improved token efficiency over AdamW on GPT-2 pretraining, though the analyzed and evaluated variants differ.

  13. Second-Order Muon Done Right: A Principled Marriage of Spectral Geometry and Curvature

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    GO-MUON combines K-FAC-style second-moment factors with Muon's polar map in a matched spectral oracle, and a four-step refresh schedule trades factor freshness for compute without claiming denoising.

  14. Learning by solving differential equations

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Runge-Kutta optimizers adapted with momentum, preconditioning, or adaptive learning rates can close the large-batch generalization gap and match Adam on small MLP workloads.

  15. Materials Learning Algorithms (MALA): Scalable Machine Learning for Electronic Structure Calculations in Large-Scale Atomistic Simulations

    cond-mat.mtrl-sci 2024-11 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    MALA predicts electron densities and energies from local atomic environments using trained neural networks, reaching system sizes beyond standard DFT.

Pith tools