Related papers: What Really Matters in Matrix-Whitening Optimizers…
We consider a variant of matrix completion where entries are revealed in a biased manner. We wish to understand the extent to which such bias can be exploited in improving predictions. Towards that, we propose a natural model where the…
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…
Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is an optimization technique designed to improve generalization by favoring flatter loss minima. To achieve this, SAM optimizes a modified objective that penalizes sharpness, using computationally…
We study the implicit bias of momentum-based optimizers on smooth homogeneous models. We show that \textit{momentum steepest descent} algorithms like Muon (spectral norm), MomentumGD ($\ell_2$ norm), and Signum ($\ell_\infty$ norm) are…
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…
Matrix factorization is a widely used approach for top-N recommendation and collaborative filtering. When implemented on implicit feedback data (such as clicks), a common heuristic is to upweight the observed interactions. This strategy has…
Data augmentation has become a standard component of vision pre-trained models to capture the invariance between augmented views. In practice, augmentation techniques that mask regions of a sample with zero/mean values or patches from other…
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…
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 Muon optimizer has demonstrated remarkable empirical success in handling matrix-structured parameters for training neural networks. However, a significant gap remains between its practical performance and theoretical understanding.…
Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has become a ubiquitous self-supervised vision paradigm. In this work, we show that MIM objectives cause the learned representations to retain non-semantic information, which ultimately hurts performance during…
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…
Automatically tuning software configuration for optimizing a single performance attribute (e.g., minimizing latency) is not trivial, due to the nature of the configuration systems (e.g., complex landscape and expensive measurement). To deal…
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By…
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…
Shampoo with Adam in the Preconditioner's eigenbasis (SOAP) has recently emerged as a promising optimization algorithm for neural network training, achieving superior training efficiency over both Adam and Shampoo in language modeling…
The Muon optimizer, based on matrix orthogonalization, has recently shown faster convergence and better computational efficiency over AdamW in LLM pre-training. However, the memory overhead of maintaining high-precision optimizer states…
Matrix factorization is a simple and effective solution to the recommendation problem. It has been extensively employed in the industry and has attracted much attention from the academia. However, it is unclear what the low-dimensional…
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…
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…