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

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…

Several variations of adaptive first-order and second-order optimization methods have been proposed to accelerate and scale the training of large language models. The performance of these optimization routines is highly sensitive to the…

The $\mu$-parameterization ($\mu$P) provides a principled foundation for large language model (LLM) training by prescribing width-independent learning dynamics, which in turn enables predictable scaling behavior and robust hyperparameter…

Gradient normalization stabilizes deep-learning optimization, and spectral normalizations are especially natural for matrix-shaped parameter blocks; Muon is the motivating example. We study an idealized deterministic, continuous-time,…

Low-rank gradient compression reduces communication in distributed training by representing updates with rank-$r$ factors. Dion is a recent method that approximates Muon, a spectral optimizer that orthogonalizes momentum, using one step of…

Muon's matrix-level update couples two distinct effects: spectral control via a polar map, and equivariance under orthogonal changes of multiplicity-space basis (Schur gauge-equivariance). We separate them with PolarAdamW, a controlled…

Modern deep learning commonly relies on AdamW with prescribed learning rate schedules, but recent works challenge both components: Schedule-Free optimization removes explicit schedules via iterate averaging, and Muon improves the update…

Orthonormalized updates accelerate training, improve stability, and enable robust hyperparameter transfer, but existing methods like Muon rely on dense matrix operations that clash with sharded weights in large-scale LLM training, causing…

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…

Modern adaptive optimization methods, such as Adam and its variants, have emerged as the most widely used tools in deep learning over recent years. These algorithms offer automatic mechanisms for dynamically adjusting the update step based…

Muon orthogonalizes matrix updates, but multi-head attention naturally operates at the level of heads. This granularity mismatch raises the question of whether Muon should be applied to the full attention projection, to individual heads, or…

Spectral gradient methods, such as the Muon optimizer, modify gradient updates by preserving directional information while discarding scale, and have shown strong empirical performance in deep learning. We investigate the mechanisms…

Scaling large models requires optimization strategies that ensure rapid convergence grounded in stability. Maximal Update Parametrization ($\boldsymbol{\mu}$P) provides a theoretical safeguard for width-invariant $\Theta(1)$ activation…

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…

Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD and Muon, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in training large foundation models. Despite this empirical success, we still lack a theoretical…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization provides a gradient-free alternative to first-order (FO) methods by estimating gradients via finite differences of function evaluations, and has recently emerged as a memory-efficient paradigm for fine-tuning…

We introduce MVN-Grad (Momentum on Variance-Normalized Gradients), an Adam-style optimizer that improves stability and performance by combining two complementary ideas: variance-based normalization and momentum applied after normalization.…

Many optimizers can be interpreted as steepest-descent methods under norm-induced geometries, and thus inherit corresponding implicit biases. We introduce \nameA{} (\fullname{}), which combines spectral control from orthogonalized update…

The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has made low-precision training essential for reducing memory, improving efficiency, and enabling larger models and datasets. Existing convergence theories for adaptive optimizers, however,…

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…