{"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/towards-practical-second-order-optimizers-in","title":"Towards Practical Second-Order Optimizers in Deep Learning: Insights from Fisher Information Analysis","arxiv_id":"2504.20096","date":"2025-04-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Damien Martins Gomes"],"abstract":"First-order optimization methods remain the standard for training deep neural networks (DNNs). Optimizers like Adam incorporate limited curvature information by preconditioning the stochastic gradient with a diagonal matrix. Despite the widespread adoption of first-order methods, second-order optimization algorithms often exhibit superior convergence compared to methods like Adam and SGD. However, their practicality in training DNNs is still limited by a significantly higher per-iteration computational cost compared to first-order methods. In this thesis, we present AdaFisher, a novel adaptive second-order optimizer that leverages a diagonal block-Kronecker approximation of the Fisher information matrix to adaptively precondition gradients. AdaFisher aims to bridge the gap between the improved convergence and generalization of second-order methods and the computational efficiency needed for training DNNs. Despite the traditionally slower speed of second-order optimizers, AdaFisher is effective for tasks such as image classification and language modeling, exhibiting remarkable stability and robustness during hyperparameter tuning. We demonstrate that AdaFisher outperforms state-of-the-art optimizers in both accuracy and convergence speed. The code is available from https://github.com/AtlasAnalyticsLab/AdaFisher.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20096v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.20096v1.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":"towards-practical-second-order-optimizers-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/AtlasAnalyticsLab/AdaFisher","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"computational-efficiency","task_name":"Computational Efficiency"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"Image Classification"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"second-order-methods","task_name":"Second-order methods"},{"task_slug":"image-classification","task_name":"image-classification"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adafisher","method_name":"AdaFisher"},{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"sgd","method_name":"SGD"},{"method_slug":"speed","method_name":"SPEED"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}