ADAHESSIAN: An Adaptive Second Order Optimizer for Machine Learning

Abstract

Incorporating second-order curvature information into machine learning optimization algorithms can be subtle, and doing so naïvely can lead to high per-iteration costs associated with forming the Hessian and performing the associated linear system solve. To address this, we introduce ADAHESSIAN, a new stochastic optimization algorithm. ADAHESSIAN directly incorporates approximate curvature information from the loss function, and it includes several novel performance-improving features, including: (i) a fast Hutchinson based method to approximate the curvature matrix with low computational overhead; (ii) a spatial averaging to reduce the variance of the second derivative; and (iii) a root-mean-square exponential moving average to smooth out variations of the second-derivative across different iterations. We perform extensive tests on NLP, CV, and recommendation system tasks, and ADAHESSIAN achieves state-of-the-art results. In particular, we find that ADAHESSIAN: (i) outperforms AdamW for transformers by 0.13/0.33 BLEU score on IWSLT14/WMT14, 2.7/1.0 PPL on PTB/Wikitext-103; (ii) outperforms AdamW for Squeeze-Bert by 0.41 points on GLUE; (iii) achieves 1.45%/5.55% higher accuracy on ResNet32/ResNet18 on Cifar10/ImageNet as compared to Adam; and (iv) achieves 0.032% better score than Adagrad for DLRM on the Criteo Ad Kaggle dataset. The cost per iteration of ADAHESSIAN is comparable to first-order methods, and ADAHESSIAN exhibits improved robustness towards variations in hyperparameter values. The code for ADAHESSIAN is open-sourced and publicly-available (Yao and Gholami 2020).