Related papers: Muon Optimizer Accelerates Grokking
Standard optimization theories struggle to explain grokking, where generalization occurs long after training convergence. While geometric studies attribute this to slow drift, they often overlook the interaction between the optimizer's…
For a long period of time, Adam has served as the ubiquitous default choice for training deep neural networks. Recently, many new optimizers have been introduced, out of which Muon has perhaps gained the highest popularity due to its…
The choice of optimizer significantly impacts the training efficiency and computational costs of large language models (LLMs). Recently, the Muon optimizer has demonstrated promising results by orthogonalizing parameter updates, improving…
We present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study of the Muon optimizer for training transformers only with a small to medium decoder (30M - 200M parameters), with an emphasis on its mathematical foundations, convergence properties…
Muon has emerged as a strong competitor to AdamW for language model pre-training, yet its behavior at scale is sensitive to weight decay. Recent work has observed that, for Muon without decoupled weight decay, the spectral norm of weight…
We demonstrate that Muon, the simplest instantiation of a second-order optimizer, explicitly expands the Pareto frontier over AdamW on the compute-time tradeoff. We find that Muon is more effective than AdamW in retaining data efficiency at…
Muon updates matrix parameters via the matrix sign of the gradient and has shown strong empirical gains, yet its dynamics and scaling behavior remain unclear in theory. We study Muon in a linear associative memory model with softmax…
The Muon optimizer, based on matrix orthogonalization, has recently shown faster convergence and better computational efficiency over AdamW in LLM pre-training. However, the memory overhead of maintaining high-precision optimizer states…
Muon, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW. This…
Gradient orthogonalization is a simple strategy that shows great utility in speeding up gradient descent. The Muon optimizer (Jordan, Jin, et al., 2024) combines gradient orthogonalization with first-order momentum and achieves significant…
Grokking -- the sudden generalisation that appears long after a model has perfectly memorised its training data -- has been widely observed but lacks a quantitative theory explaining the length of the delay. We show that grokking is a…
Adversarial training (AT) remains one of the most reliable empirical defenses against adversarial attacks. Its robustness critically depends on how the underlying min-max objective is optimized. In practice, Stochastic Gradient Descent…
DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints. However, DiLoCo's performance has been shown to degrade as the…
Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators often suffer from severe optimization difficulties caused by ill-conditioned gradients, multi-scale spectral behavior, and stiffness induced by physical constraints. Recently, the Muon…
Muon has emerged as an efficient alternative to Adam for pretraining, yet remains underused for fine-tuning. A key obstacle is that most open models are pretrained with Adam, and naively switching to Muon for fine-tuning leads to degraded…
The Muon optimizer has received considerable attention for its strong performance in training large language models, yet the design principle behind its matrix-gradient orthogonalization remains largely elusive. In this paper, we introduce…
Matrix-structured parameters frequently appear in many artificial intelligence models such as large language models. More recently, an efficient Muon optimizer is designed for matrix parameters of large-scale models, and shows markedly…
Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…
The Muon optimizer, a matrix-structured algorithm that leverages spectral orthogonalization of gradients, is a milestone in the pretraining of large language models. However, the underlying mechanisms of Muon -- particularly the role of…
Grokking is proposed and widely studied as an intricate phenomenon in which generalization is achieved after a long-lasting period of overfitting. In this work, we propose NeuralGrok, a novel gradient-based approach that learns an optimal…