Related papers: Convergence of Muon with Newton-Schulz
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…
Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization. However, its practical efficiency is limited by the…
Muon orthogonalizes the momentum buffer before each update, replacing its singular values with ones via Newton-Schulz iterations. This simple change lets Muon tolerate far larger learning rates and converge faster than other optimizers, but…
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…
Muon updates weight matrices along (approximate) polar factors of the gradients and has shown strong empirical performance in large-scale training. Existing attempts at explaining its performance largely focus on single-step comparisons (on…
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…
Most first-order optimizers treat matrix-valued parameters as vectors, ignoring the intrinsic geometry of hidden-layer weights in neural networks. Muon addresses this mismatch by updating along the polar factor of a momentum matrix, but its…
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…
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…
Muon-style optimizers take a matrix-valued momentum or preconditioned update $B = U \operatorname{diag}(\sigma_1,\ldots,\sigma_r) V^\top$ and replace it with its canonical partial polar factor $\operatorname{Pol}(B) = U V^\top$. This maps…
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.…
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…
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…
Muon is a recently proposed optimizer that enforces orthogonality in parameter updates by projecting gradients onto the Stiefel manifold, leading to stable and efficient training in large-scale deep neural networks. Meanwhile, the…
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…
Distributed training of large neural networks is bottlenecked by full-precision gradient communication and by coordinatewise optimizers that ignore the matrix structure of weight tensors. We propose Sign-Muon, a 1-bit, matrix-aware…
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 Muon optimizer has recently demonstrated remarkable empirical success in training large language models. However, the theoretical understanding of its mechanisms remains limited. Current convergence guarantees for Muon rely heavily on…
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…
Muon and related normalized optimizers decouple the choice of update direction from the choice of step scale, but their practical performance remains sensitive to the scale of the normalized step. We study adaptive scaling rules for Muon in…