Techniques herein train a multilayer perceptron, sparsify edges of a graph such as the perceptron, and store edges and vertices of the graph. Each edge has weight. A computer sparsifies perceptron edges. The computer performs a forward-backward pass on the perceptron to calculate a sparse Hessian matrix. Based on that Hessian, the computer performs quasi-Newton perceptron optimization. The computer repeats this until convergence. The computer stores edges in an array and vertices in another array. Each edge has weight and input and output indices. Each vertex has input and output indices. The computer inserts each edge into an input linked list based on its weight. Each link of the input linked list has the next input index of an edge. The computer inserts each edge into an output linked list based on its weight. Each link of the output linked list comprises the next output index of an edge.