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Related papers: Practical Efficiency of Muon for Pretraining

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sushant Mehta , Raj Dandekar , Rajat Dandekar , Sreedath Panat

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Naoki Sato , Hiroki Naganuma , Hideaki Iiduka

Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization. However, its practical efficiency is limited by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Ziyue Liu , Ruijie Zhang , Zhengyang Wang , Yequan Zhao , Yupeng Su , Zi Yang , Zheng Zhang

Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Zichong Li , Liming Liu , Chen Liang , Weizhu Chen , Tuo Zhao

Muon optimizer has demonstrated robust results in pretraining of language models but its performance in finetuning of existing public pretrained models is not yet explored. Currently, Muon is used along with AdamW introducing a scope of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Saurabh Page , Advait Joshi , S. S. Sonawane

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…

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Zhehang Du , Weijie Su

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Benjamin Thérien , Xiaolong Huang , Aaron Defazio , Irina Rish , Eugene Belilovsky

The majority of parameters in neural networks are naturally represented as matrices. However, most commonly used optimizers treat these matrix parameters as flattened vectors during optimization, potentially overlooking their inherent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Wei Shen , Ruichuan Huang , Minhui Huang , Cong Shen , Jiawei Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ahmed Khaled , Kaan Ozkara , Tao Yu , Mingyi Hong , Youngsuk Park

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Feihu Huang , Yuning Luo , Songcan Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kai Lion , Florian Hübler , Bingcong Li , Antonio Orvieto , Niao He

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sara Dragutinović , Rajesh Ranganath

In large-scale optimization, the cheapness and effectiveness of update steps are the most crucial factors for a successful optimizer. Sign-based optimizers like Lion or Signum produce cheap per-step updates, whereas Muon's spectral…

The Muon optimizer has rapidly emerged as a powerful, geometry-aware alternative to AdamW, demonstrating strong performance in large-scale training of neural networks. However, a critical theory-practice disconnect exists: Muon's efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Egor Shulgin , Sultan AlRashed , Francesco Orabona , Peter Richtárik

Large models recently are widely applied in artificial intelligence, so efficient training of large models has received widespread attention. More recently, a useful Muon optimizer is specifically designed for matrix-structured parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Feihu Huang , Yuning Luo , Songcan Chen

Several recently introduced deep learning optimizers utilizing matrix-level preconditioning have shown promising speedups relative to the current dominant optimizer AdamW, particularly in relatively small-scale experiments. However, efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Shikai Qiu , Zixi Chen , Hoang Phan , Qi Lei , Andrew Gordon Wilson

This paper investigates the impact of different optimizers on the grokking phenomenon, where models exhibit delayed generalization. We conducted experiments across seven numerical tasks (primarily modular arithmetic) using a modern…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Amund Tveit , Bjørn Remseth , Arve Skogvold

The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shuche Wang , Fengzhuo Zhang , Jiaxiang Li , Cunxiao Du , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Zhuoran Yang , Mingyi Hong , Vincent Y. F. Tan
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