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Modular Duality in Deep Learning

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arxiv 2410.21265 v2 pith:2NWJYJSZ submitted 2024-10-28 cs.LG cs.NEstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.NEstat.ML
keywords dualitymodularneuralalgorithmsdualizationfastfirstgeneral
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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An old idea in optimization theory says that since the gradient is a dual vector it may not be subtracted from the weights without first being mapped to the primal space where the weights reside. We take this idea seriously in this paper and construct such a duality map for general neural networks. Our map, which we call modular dualization, forms a unifying theoretical basis for training algorithms that are a) fast and b) scalable. Modular dualization involves first assigning operator norms to layers based on the semantics of each layer, and then using these layerwise norms to recursively induce a duality map on the weight space of the full neural architecture. We conclude by deriving GPU-friendly algorithms for dualizing Embed, Linear and Conv2D layers -- the latter two methods are based on a rectangular Newton-Schulz iteration (Kovarik, 1970; Bj\"orck & Bowie, 1971). A variant of our methods was used to set speed records for training NanoGPT. Overall, we hope that our theory of modular duality will yield a next generation of fast and scalable optimizers for general neural architectures.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. 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.

  2. Reassessing Muon for Matrix Factorization

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Muon's advantage over AdamW is problem-dependent: it loses or ties on plain low-rank factorization and completion but wins on nonnegative matrix factorization.

  3. SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SOAP and Muon, stabilized by per-step QR eigenbasis updates and KL-Shampoo covariance accumulation, beat AdamW on large-batch LLM pretraining up to 100M-token batches.

  4. GaussianGPT: Towards Autoregressive 3D Gaussian Scene Generation

    cs.CV 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A causal transformer with 3D RoPE generates vector-quantized 3D Gaussian latent grids autoregressively, enabling unconditional synthesis, completion, and open-ended outpainting of indoor scenes.

  5. Decoupling Variance and Scale-Invariant Updates in Adaptive Gradient Descent for Unified Vector and Matrix Optimization

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    DeVA_S8 reweights Muon's matrix-sign update in the matrix's eigenbasis with a singular-value signal-to-noise ratio, reaching target LLM validation perplexity with ~6.6% fewer tokens than Muon.

  6. Low-rank Momentum Factorization for Memory Efficient Training

    cs.LG 2025-07 reject novelty 6.0 of 10

    MoFaSGD keeps a low-rank factored momentum and uses its singular vectors as the update direction, achieving LoRA-level memory with competitive fine-tuning performance, but its convergence proof is flawed.

  7. Token Geometry

    cs.LG 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 5.5 of 10

    Ember matches Adam on embedding/LM-head tables with O(V+D) state by factoring second moments and dropping first-moment momentum, and token trajectories look nearly 1D.

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