Fast Training of Large Kernel Models with Delayed Projections

Amirhesam Abedsoltan, Siyuan Ma, Parthe Pandit, Misha Belkin

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

Classical kernel machines have historically faced significant challenges in scaling to large datasets and model sizes—a key ingredient that has driven the success of neural networks. In this paper, we present a new methodology for building kernel machines that can scale efficiently with both data size and model size. Our algorithm introduces delayed projections to Preconditioned Stochastic Gradient Descent (PSGD) allowing the training of much larger models than was previously feasible. We validate our algorithm, \EP4, across multiple datasets, demonstrating drastic training speedups without compromising the performance. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/EigenPro/EigenPro .