The dynamics of matrix momentum

Abstract

We analyse the matrix momentum algorithm, which provides an efficient approximation to on-line Newton's method, by extending a recent statistical mechanics framework to include second order algorithms. We study the efficacy of this method when the Hessian is available and also consider a practical implementation which uses a single example estimate of the Hessian. The method is shown to provide excellent asymptotic performance, although the single example implementation is sensitive to the choice of training parameters. We conjecture that matrix momentum could provide efficient matrix inversion for other second order algorithms.