Related papers: TEON: Tensorized Orthonormalization Beyond Layer-W…
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…
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…
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…
Matrix-structured parameters frequently appear in many artificial intelligence models such as large language models. More recently, an efficient Muon optimizer is designed for matrix parameters of large-scale models, and shows markedly…
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 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…
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…
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…
A central challenge in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks can substantially degrade performance on previously learned ones. Existing projection-based methods mitigate…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
Optimization with matrix gradient orthogonalization has recently demonstrated impressive results in the training of deep neural networks (Jordan et al., 2024; Liu et al., 2025). In this paper, we provide a theoretical analysis of this…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…