Related papers: Muon Optimizes Under Spectral Norm Constraints
In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps…
Preconditioned adaptive methods have gained significant attention for training deep neural networks, as they capture rich curvature information of the loss landscape. The central challenge in this field lies in balancing preconditioning…
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 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…
To define a steepest descent method over a neural network, we need to choose a norm for each layer, a way to aggregate these norms across layers, and whether to use normalization. We systematically explore different alternatives for…
We study the implicit bias of momentum-based optimizers on smooth homogeneous models. We show that \textit{momentum steepest descent} algorithms like Muon (spectral norm), MomentumGD ($\ell_2$ norm), and Signum ($\ell_\infty$ norm) are…
The Muon optimizer has demonstrated remarkable empirical success in handling matrix-structured parameters for training neural networks. However, a significant gap remains between its practical performance and theoretical understanding.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet pretraining is computationally demanding, making optimizer efficiency an important practical consideration. Muon…
In this work, we develop proximal preconditioned gradient methods with a focus on spectral gradient methods providing a proximal extension to the Muon and Scion optimizers. We introduce a family of stochastic algorithms that can handle a…
Muon is a matrix-aware optimizer that leverages Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to enforce spectral gradient orthogonalization by driving all singular values of the momentum matrix toward 1. While this uniform spectral whitening enhances…
The Muon optimizer enjoys strong empirical performance and theoretical grounding. However, the super-linear cost of its orthonormalization step introduces increasing overhead with scale. To alleviate this cost, several works have attempted…
While adaptive gradient methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning, sign-based optimization algorithms such as Lion and Muon have recently demonstrated superior empirical performance over AdamW in training large language models…
Recent optimizers like Muon, Scion, and Gluon have pushed the frontier of large-scale deep learning by exploiting layer-wise linear minimization oracles (LMOs) over non-Euclidean norm balls, capturing neural network structure in ways…
The Muon optimizer has demonstrated strong empirical performance in pre-training large language models by performing matrix-level gradient (or momentum) orthogonalization in each layer independently. In this work, we propose TEON, a…
Most first-order optimizers treat matrix-valued parameters as vectors, ignoring the intrinsic geometry of hidden-layer weights in neural networks. Muon addresses this mismatch by updating along the polar factor of a momentum matrix, but its…
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…
Recent developments in deep learning optimization have brought about radically new algorithms based on the Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) framework, such as $\sf Muon$ and $\sf Scion$. After over a decade of $\sf Adam$'s dominance, these…
A central challenge in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks can substantially degrade performance on previously learned ones. Existing projection-based methods mitigate…
Modern optimizers, like Muon, impose matrix-wise geometry constraints on their updates. These matrix-wise constraints can be unified under Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) theory. However, all current methods impose fixed LMO geometries for…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…