Related papers: NorMuon: Making Muon more efficient and scalable
The ever-growing scale of deep learning models and training data underscores the critical importance of efficient optimization methods. While preconditioned gradient methods such as Adam and AdamW are the de facto optimizers for training…
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…
Physics-informed neural networks and neural operators often suffer from severe optimization difficulties caused by ill-conditioned gradients, multi-scale spectral behavior, and stiffness induced by physical constraints. Recently, the Muon…
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…
Standard neural network training relies on learning-rate schedules tied to a fixed horizon, leading to strong path dependence and costly re-tuning as data availability changes. Schedule-Free (SF) methods address this by removing explicit…
Optimization lies at the core of modern deep learning, yet existing methods often face a fundamental trade-off between adapting to problem geometry and leveraging curvature utilization. Steepest descent algorithms adapt to different…
Orthogonalized-update optimizers such as Muon improve training of matrix-valued parameters, but existing extensions typically either rescale updates after orthogonalization or use heavier whitening-based preconditioners before it. We…
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…
MLP is a heavily used backbone in modern deep learning (DL) architectures for supervised learning on tabular data, and AdamW is the go-to optimizer used to train tabular DL models. Unlike architecture design, however, the choice of…
The Muon optimizer has recently attracted attention due to its orthogonalized first-order updates, and a deeper theoretical understanding of its convergence behavior is essential for guiding practical applications; however, existing…
Muon is a matrix-aware optimizer that leverages Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to enforce spectral gradient orthogonalization by driving all singular values of the momentum matrix toward 1. While this uniform spectral whitening enhances…
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…
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…
AdamW has long been the dominant optimizer in language model pretraining, despite numerous claims that alternative optimizers offer 1.4 to 2x speedup. We posit that two methodological shortcomings have obscured fair comparisons and hindered…
The Muon optimizer enjoys strong empirical performance and theoretical grounding. However, the super-linear cost of its orthonormalization step introduces increasing overhead with scale. To alleviate this cost, several works have attempted…
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…
Optimizers are crucial for the efficient training of Large Language Models (LLMs). While AdamW is the de facto standard, recent structure-aware optimizers like Muon have emerged, which regularize gradient updates by operating on entire…
Orthonormalized updates accelerate training, improve stability, and enable robust hyperparameter transfer, but existing methods like Muon rely on dense matrix operations that clash with sharded weights in large-scale LLM training, causing…
Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…
Modern optimizers like Adam and Muon are central to training large language models, but their reliance on first- and second-order momenta introduces significant memory overhead, which constrains scalability and computational efficiency. In…