{"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/scalable-and-practical-natural-gradient-for","title":"Scalable and Practical Natural Gradient for Large-Scale Deep Learning","arxiv_id":"2002.06015","date":"2020-02-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Kazuki Osawa","Yohei Tsuji","Yuichiro Ueno","Akira Naruse","Chuan-Sheng Foo","Rio Yokota"],"abstract":"Large-scale distributed training of deep neural networks results in models with worse generalization performance as a result of the increase in the effective mini-batch size. Previous approaches attempt to address this problem by varying the learning rate and batch size over epochs and layers, or ad hoc modifications of batch normalization. We propose Scalable and Practical Natural Gradient Descent (SP-NGD), a principled approach for training models that allows them to attain similar generalization performance to models trained with first-order optimization methods, but with accelerated convergence. Furthermore, SP-NGD scales to large mini-batch sizes with a negligible computational overhead as compared to first-order methods. We evaluated SP-NGD on a benchmark task where highly optimized first-order methods are available as references: training a ResNet-50 model for image classification on ImageNet. We demonstrate convergence to a top-1 validation accuracy of 75.4% in 5.5 minutes using a mini-batch size of 32,768 with 1,024 GPUs, as well as an accuracy of 74.9% with an extremely large mini-batch size of 131,072 in 873 steps of SP-NGD.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.06015v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.06015v1.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":"scalable-and-practical-natural-gradient-for","repo_url":"https://github.com/tyohei/chainerkfac","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"deep-learning","task_name":"Deep Learning"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"natural-gradient-descent","method_name":"Natural Gradient Descent"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2002.06015","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2002.06015"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/tyohei/chainerkfac","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"b4e26744ad9e217a","entry":"extract","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b4e26744ad9e217a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}