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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)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Sarit Khirirat , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Yury Demidovich , Peter Richtárik

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tien-Phat Nguyen , Truong Nguyen , Minh-Phuc Truong , Tuc Nguyen , James Bailey , Trung Le

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kexuan Shi , Hanxuan Li , Zeju Qiu , Yandong Wen , Simon Buchholz , Weiyang Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Albert Yi

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Thibaut Boissin , Thomas Massena , Franck Mamalet , Mathieu Serrurier

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yifeng Liu , Angela Yuan , Quanquan Gu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Kaja Gruntkowska , Yassine Maziane , Zheng Qu , Peter Richtárik

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-13 Antoine Gonon , Andreea-Alexandra Muşat , Nicolas Boumal

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yuxuan Lou , Yang You

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 John Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ben S. Southworth , Stephen Thomas

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinghui Yuan , Jiaxuan Zou , Shuo Wang , Yong Liu , Feiping Nie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Teodor-Mihai Stupariu , Andrei Manolache

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Chen Fan , Mark Schmidt , Christos Thrampoulidis

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…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-18 Bile Peng , Karl-Ludwig Besser , Ramprasad Raghunath , Eduard A. Jorswieck

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)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Abdelrahman Abouzeid

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xun Qian , Alexander Gaponov , Grigory Malinovsky , Peter Richtárik