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Related papers: NorMuon: Making Muon more efficient and scalable

200 papers

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Shenyang Deng , Zhuoli Ouyang , Tianyu Pang , Zihang Liu , Ruochen Jin , Shuhua Yu , Yaoqing Yang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Egor Shulgin , Sultan AlRashed , Francesco Orabona , Peter Richtárik

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Chuan He , Zhanwang Deng , Zhaosong Lu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-03 Zhehang Du , Weijie Su

The optimization of large language models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly as model scaling exacerbates sensitivity to algorithmic imprecision and training instability. Recent advances in optimizers have improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Wei He , Kai Han , Hang Zhou , Hanting Chen , Zhicheng Liu , Xinghao Chen , Yunhe Wang

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jianhao Ma , Yu Huang , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Jun Yan , Weiquan Huang , Jiankai Zuo , Yujian Mo , Xi Fang , Chengliang Wu , Zeming Wei

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aditya Ranganath

Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuxing Liu , Jianyu Wang , Tong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Sushant Mehta , Raj Dandekar , Rajat Dandekar , Sreedath Panat

Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large language model pre-training, orthogonalizing the momentum matrix via Newton--Schulz polar iterations. A natural intuition is that polar iterations, by flattening the singular…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Ruijie Zhang , Yequan Zhao , Ziyue Liu , Zhengyang Wang , Yupeng Su , Liyan Tan , Zheng Zhang

The Muon optimizer has emerged as a compelling alternative to Adam for training large language models, achieving remarkable computational savings through gradient orthogonalization. However, Muon's optimizer state is more sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yupeng Su , Ruijie Zhang , Ziyue Liu , Yequan Zhao , Zheng Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Wei Shen , Ruichuan Huang , Minhui Huang , Cong Shen , Jiawei Zhang

Muon has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to AdamW for large-scale pre-training, with orthogonalization via Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations as its core operation. Existing Muon variants apply a uniform NS schedule to all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Xinlin Zhuang , Panyi Ouyang , Yichen Li , Jiangming Shi , Yizhang Chen , Shuman Liu , Ying Qian , Weiyang Liu , Haibo Zhang , Imran Razzak

Muon-style optimizers leverage Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to orthogonalize updates, yielding update geometries that often outperform Adam-series methods. However, this orthogonalization discards magnitude information, rendering training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Peng Cheng , Jiucheng Zang , Qingnan Li , Liheng Ma , Yufei Cui , Yingxue Zhang , Boxing Chen , Ming Jian , Wen Tong

Muon, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Naoki Sato , Hiroki Naganuma , Hideaki Iiduka

The Muon optimizer has recently attracted considerable attention for its strong empirical performance and use of orthogonalized updates on matrix-shaped parameters, yet its underlying mechanisms and relationship to adaptive optimizers such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Xianbiao Qi , Marco Chen , Jiaquan Ye , Yelin He , Rong Xiao

The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Minxin Zhang , Yuxuan Liu , Hayden Schaeffer