Related papers: Delving into Muon and Beyond: Deep Analysis and Ex…

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…

Muon is a recently developed matrix-aware optimizer that has shown strong results in transformer training, but its behavior in vision transformers (ViTs) is not yet well understood. We study Muon for ViT training, largely on ImageNet-100…

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,…

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-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 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…

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…

Adversarial training (AT) remains one of the most reliable empirical defenses against adversarial attacks. Its robustness critically depends on how the underlying min-max objective is optimized. In practice, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

In recent years, Muon has emerged as the dominant method for training large language models, and transformers more broadly. The essential difference, when compared to standard gradient descent methods, is to replace the usual update matrix…

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…

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…

For a long period of time, Adam has served as the ubiquitous default choice for training deep neural networks. Recently, many new optimizers have been introduced, out of which Muon has perhaps gained the highest popularity due to its…

The Muon optimizer has emerged as a compelling alternative to Adam for training large language models, achieving remarkable computational savings through gradient orthogonalization. However, Muon's optimizer state is more sensitive to…

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…

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…

Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic…

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…

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-style optimizers leverage Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to orthogonalize updates, yielding update geometries that often outperform Adam-series methods. However, this orthogonalization discards magnitude information, rendering training…