Related papers: Muon is Provably Faster with Momentum Variance Red…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet pretraining is computationally demanding, making optimizer efficiency an important practical consideration. Muon…
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.…
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…
The use of momentum in stochastic optimization algorithms has shown empirical success across a range of machine learning tasks. Recently, a new class of stochastic momentum algorithms has emerged within the Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO)…
Recent developments have shown that Muon-type optimizers based on linear minimization oracles (LMOs) over non-Euclidean norm balls have the potential to get superior practical performance than Adam-type methods in the training of large…
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…
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…
Recently, a new optimization method based on the linear minimization oracle (LMO), called Muon, has been attracting increasing attention since it can train neural networks faster than existing adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam. In…
Orthogonal momentum gradient updates have emerged to overcome the limitations of vector-based optimizers like Adam. The vector-based optimizer Adam suffers from high memory costs and ill-conditioned momentum gradient updates. However,…
Large models recently are widely applied in artificial intelligence, so efficient training of large models has received widespread attention. More recently, a useful Muon optimizer is specifically designed for matrix-structured parameters…
In this work, we study optimization methods that leverage the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over a norm-ball. We propose a new stochastic family of algorithms that uses the LMO to adapt to the geometry of the problem and, perhaps…
Matrix-based preconditioned optimizers, such as Muon, have recently been shown to be more efficient than scalar-based optimizers for training large-scale neural networks, including large language models (LLMs). Recent benchmark studies of…
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 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…
The Muon optimizer has recently offered a promising alternative to AdamW for large language model training, leveraging matrix orthogonalization to produce geometry-aware updates. However, like all first-order methods, Muon can become…
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 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 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 choice of optimizer significantly impacts the training efficiency and computational costs of large language models (LLMs). Recently, the Muon optimizer has demonstrated promising results by orthogonalizing parameter updates, improving…
Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling…