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

Muon has recently shown promising results in LLM training. In this work, we study how to further improve Muon. We argue that Muon's orthogonalized update rule suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes the…

We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores…

With the rapid development of natural language processing technology, large-scale language models (LLM) have achieved remarkable results in a variety of tasks. However, how to effectively train these huge models and improve their…

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…

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…

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) is a foundational machine learning problem that has seen extensive development over the past decade. Recently, various optimization-based MTL approaches have been proposed to learn multiple tasks simultaneously by…

Adversarial training (AT) remains one of the most reliable empirical defenses against adversarial attacks. Its robustness critically depends on how the underlying min-max objective is optimized. In practice, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Learning to optimize (L2O) has gained increasing attention since classical optimizers require laborious problem-specific design and hyperparameter tuning. However, there is a gap between the practical demand and the achievable performance…

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…

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…

Stochastic Frank-Wolfe is a classical optimization method for solving constrained optimization problems. On the other hand, recent optimizers such as Lion and Muon have gained quite significant popularity in deep learning. In this work,…

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…

Learning to Optimize (L2O) enhances optimization efficiency with integrated neural networks. L2O paradigms achieve great outcomes, e.g., refitting optimizer, generating unseen solutions iteratively or directly. However, conventional L2O…

The memory challenges associated with training Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a critical concern, particularly when using the Adam optimizer. To address this issue, numerous memory-efficient techniques have been proposed, with…

Recent optimizers such as Lion and Muon have demonstrated strong empirical performance by normalizing gradient momentum via linear minimization oracles (LMOs). While variance reduction has been explored to accelerate LMO-based methods, it…

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…

Automated optimization modeling via Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising approach to assist complex human decision-making. While post-training has become a pivotal technique to enhance LLMs' capabilities in this domain,…

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…

Pre-training Large Language Models requires immense computational resources, making optimizer efficiency essential. The optimization landscape is highly anisotropic, with loss reduction driven predominantly by progress along flat…

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…