Related papers: Uniform Spectral Growth and Convergence of Muon in…

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…

Despite the empirical success of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in fine-tuning pre-trained models, there is little theoretical understanding of how first-order methods with carefully crafted initialization adapt models to new tasks. In this…

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…

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…

The growing adoption of spectrum-aware matrix-valued optimizers such as Muon and Shampoo in deep learning motivates a systematic study of their generalization properties and, in particular, when they might outperform competitive algorithms.…

Muon updates matrix parameters via the matrix sign of the gradient and has shown strong empirical gains, yet its dynamics and scaling behavior remain unclear in theory. We study Muon in a linear associative memory model with softmax…

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges. Low-rank factorization offers a promising route to reduce training and inference costs, but the…

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…

Large language model pre-training typically exhibits a two-phase trajectory: a fast initial loss drop followed by a prolonged slow improvement. We identify an underlying spectral phenomenon, Stability of Singular Distribution (SoSD), where…

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…

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 and related norm-constrained matrix optimizers have become central to large-scale learning problems. They are formulated as a linear maximization oracle (LMO) over an ambient matrix-norm ball in unconstrained Euclidean space. However,…

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), particularly Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), adapts large language models (LLMs) by training only a small fraction of parameters. However, as the rank of the low-rank matrices used for adaptation…

Recently, Muon and related spectral optimizers have demonstrated strong empirical performance as scalable stochastic methods, often outperforming Adam. Yet their behaviour remains poorly understood. We analyze stochastic spectral…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a widely adopted parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) technique for foundation models. Recent work has highlighted an inherent asymmetry in the initialization of LoRA's low-rank factors, which has…

The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers a parameter-efficient paradigm for tuning large models. While recent spectral initialization methods improve convergence and performance over the naive "Noise & Zeros" scheme, their extra computational and…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has significantly advanced parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large pretrained models. LoRA augments the pre-trained weights of a model by adding the product of two smaller matrices that together form a low-rank…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

As the number of model parameters increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the go-to choice for tailoring pre-trained large language models. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses a low-rank update method to simulate full…