Related papers: Muon in Associative Memory Learning: Training Dyna…

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…

Spectral gradient methods, such as the recently popularized Muon optimizer, are a promising alternative to standard Euclidean gradient descent for training deep neural networks and transformers, but it is still unclear in which regimes they…

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…

The core bottleneck of Federated Learning (FL) lies in the communication rounds. That is, how to achieve more effective local updates is crucial for reducing communication rounds. Existing FL methods still primarily use element-wise local…

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 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…

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…

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…

We demonstrate that Muon, the simplest instantiation of a second-order optimizer, explicitly expands the Pareto frontier over AdamW on the compute-time tradeoff. We find that Muon is more effective than AdamW in retaining data efficiency at…

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…

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 has emerged as an efficient alternative to Adam for pretraining, yet remains underused for fine-tuning. A key obstacle is that most open models are pretrained with Adam, and naively switching to Muon for fine-tuning leads to degraded…

While adaptive gradient methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning, sign-based optimization algorithms such as Lion and Muon have recently demonstrated superior empirical performance over AdamW in training large language models…

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…

The Muon optimizer has recently attracted considerable attention for its strong empirical performance and use of orthogonalized updates on matrix-shaped parameters, yet its underlying mechanisms and relationship to adaptive optimizers such…

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…

In this work, we develop proximal preconditioned gradient methods with a focus on spectral gradient methods providing a proximal extension to the Muon and Scion optimizers. We introduce a family of stochastic algorithms that can handle a…

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,…

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…

Applying weight decay (WD) to matrix layers is standard practice in large-language-model pretraining. Prior work suggests that stochastic gradient noise induces a Brownian-like expansion of the weight matrices W, whose growth is…