Related papers: Muon Optimizes Under Spectral Norm Constraints
The use of momentum in stochastic optimization algorithms has shown empirical success across a range of machine learning tasks. Recently, a new class of stochastic momentum algorithms has emerged within the Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO)…
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…
This work presents a novel, fully Riemannian framework for Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) that geometrically treats low-rank adapters by optimizing them directly on the fixed-rank manifold. This formulation eliminates the parametrization…
Muon orthogonalizes the momentum buffer before each update, replacing its singular values with ones via Newton-Schulz iterations. This simple change lets Muon tolerate far larger learning rates and converge faster than other optimizers, but…
We introduce Pion, a spectrum-preserving optimizer for large language model (LLM) training based on orthogonal equivalence transformation. Unlike additive optimizers such as Adam and Muon, Pion updates each weight matrix through left and…
Muon-style optimizers take a matrix-valued momentum or preconditioned update $B = U \operatorname{diag}(\sigma_1,\ldots,\sigma_r) V^\top$ and replace it with its canonical partial polar factor $\operatorname{Pol}(B) = U V^\top$. This maps…
Orthogonality-based optimizers, such as Muon, have recently shown strong performance across large-scale training and community-driven efficiency challenges. However, these methods rely on a costly gradient orthogonalization step. Even…
Matrix-based preconditioned optimizers, such as Muon, have recently been shown to be more efficient than scalar-based optimizers for training large-scale neural networks, including large language models (LLMs). Recent benchmark studies of…
Conventional wisdom in deep learning optimization dictates updating all layers at every step-a principle followed by all recent state-of-the-art optimizers such as Muon. In this work, we challenge this assumption, showing that full-network…
Muon updates weight matrices along (approximate) polar factors of the gradients and has shown strong empirical performance in large-scale training. Existing attempts at explaining its performance largely focus on single-step comparisons (on…
Muon improves neural-network training by orthogonalizing matrix-valued updates, but it leaves each layer's update magnitude controlled mostly by a global learning rate. We introduce OrScale, a trust-ratio extension of Muon built on a simple…
The $\mu$-parameterization ($\mu$P) provides a principled foundation for large language model (LLM) training by prescribing width-independent learning dynamics, which in turn enables predictable scaling behavior and robust hyperparameter…
Orthogonalized-momentum optimizers such as Muon improve transformer training by approximately whitening/orthogonalizing matrix-valued momentum updates via a short polar-decomposition iteration. However, polar-factor approximations typically…
Matrix-based optimizers have demonstrated immense potential in training Large Language Models (LLMs), however, designing an ideal optimizer remains a formidable challenge. A superior optimizer must satisfy three core desiderata: efficiency,…
Equivariant neural networks encode geometric symmetries by construction, yet they are often difficult to optimize and can underperform less constrained architectures. A growing body of work addresses this through architectural modifications…
Different gradient-based methods for optimizing overparameterized models can all achieve zero training error yet converge to distinctly different solutions inducing different generalization properties. We provide the first complete…
This work presents a machine learning approach to optimize the energy efficiency (EE) in a multi-cell wireless network. This optimization problem is non-convex and its global optimum is difficult to find. In the literature, either simple…
We present a method to formulate algorithm discovery as program search, and apply it to discover optimization algorithms for deep neural network training. We leverage efficient search techniques to explore an infinite and sparse program…
In LLM training, normalization layers and optimizers are typically treated as independent design choices. In a 3x2 factorial at 1B parameters and 1000 training steps, we show this assumption can fail: Dynamic Erf (Derf; Chen & Liu, 2025)…
Recent developments have shown that Muon-type optimizers based on linear minimization oracles (LMOs) over non-Euclidean norm balls have the potential to get superior practical performance than Adam-type methods in the training of large…