{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/nysact-a-scalable-preconditioned-gradient","title":"NysAct: A Scalable Preconditioned Gradient Descent using Nystrom Approximation","arxiv_id":"2506.08360","date":"2025-06-10","proceeding":null,"authors":["Hyunseok Seung","Jaewoo Lee","Hyunsuk Ko"],"abstract":"Adaptive gradient methods are computationally efficient and converge quickly, but they often suffer from poor generalization. In contrast, second-order methods enhance convergence and generalization but typically incur high computational and memory costs. In this work, we introduce NysAct, a scalable first-order gradient preconditioning method that strikes a balance between state-of-the-art first-order and second-order optimization methods. NysAct leverages an eigenvalue-shifted Nystrom method to approximate the activation covariance matrix, which is used as a preconditioning matrix, significantly reducing time and memory complexities with minimal impact on test accuracy. Our experiments show that NysAct not only achieves improved test accuracy compared to both first-order and second-order methods but also demands considerably less computational resources than existing second-order methods. Code is available at https://github.com/hseung88/nysact.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08360v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08360v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"nysact-a-scalable-preconditioned-gradient","repo_url":"https://github.com/hseung88/nysact","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"second-order-methods","task_name":"Second-order methods"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}