Related papers: LiMuon: Light and Fast Muon Optimizer for Large Mo…

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 has recently demonstrated remarkable empirical success in training large language models. However, the theoretical understanding of its mechanisms remains limited. Current convergence guarantees for Muon rely heavily on…

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…

Training large language models requires optimization algorithms that are not only statistically effective, but also computationally and memory efficient at extreme scale. Although Adam remains the dominant optimizer for large-scale…

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…

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…

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…

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 pursuit of faster optimization algorithms remains an active and important research direction in deep learning. Recently, the Muon optimizer [JJB+24] has demonstrated promising empirical performance, but its theoretical foundation…

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…

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…

Neural network (NN) training is inherently a large-scale matrix optimization problem, yet the matrix structure of NN parameters has long been overlooked. Recently, the optimizer Muon \citep{jordanmuon}, which explicitly exploits this…

In this note, we inspect the convergence of a new optimizer for pretraining LLMs, namely the Muon optimizer. Such an optimizer is closely related to a specialized steepest descent method where the update direction is the minimizer of the…

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…

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…

Muon is a recently proposed optimizer that enforces orthogonality in parameter updates by projecting gradients onto the Stiefel manifold, leading to stable and efficient training in large-scale deep neural networks. Meanwhile, the…

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…

Muon has recently emerged as a strong alternative to AdamW for training neural networks, with encouraging large-scale pretraining results and growing evidence that matrix-structured updates can be faster in practice. Yet Muon, and more…

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…

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…