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An algorithm is said to be adaptive to a certain parameter (of the problem) if it does not need a priori knowledge of such a parameter but performs competitively to those that know it. This dissertation presents our work on adaptive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Zhenxun Zhuang

Despite the recent ubiquity of large language models and their high zero-shot prompted performance across a wide range of tasks, it is still not known how well they perform on tasks which require processing of potentially idiomatic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Dylan Phelps , Thomas Pickard , Maggie Mi , Edward Gow-Smith , Aline Villavicencio

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Binghui Li , Kaifei Wang , Han Zhong , Pinyan Lu , Liwei Wang

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…

Distributed methods are essential for handling machine learning pipelines comprising large-scale models and datasets. However, their benefits often come at the cost of increased communication overhead between the central server and agents,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Enea Monzio Compagnoni , Rustem Islamov , Frank Norbert Proske , Aurelien Lucchi

The Muon optimizer has demonstrated strong empirical performance in pre-training large language models by performing matrix-level gradient (or momentum) orthogonalization in each layer independently. In this work, we propose TEON, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Ruijie Zhang , Yequan Zhao , Ziyue Liu , Zhengyang Wang , Dongyang Li , Yupeng Su , Sijia Liu , Zheng Zhang

We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Kaiyuan Zhou , Xiaoyu Zhang , Wenyang Zhang , Di Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Chuan He , Zhanwang Deng , Zhaosong Lu

The Lion optimizer has been a promising competitor with the AdamW for training large AI models, with advantages on memory, computation, and sample efficiency. In this paper, we introduce Distributed Lion, an innovative adaptation of Lion…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Bo Liu , Lemeng Wu , Lizhang Chen , Kaizhao Liang , Jiaxu Zhu , Chen Liang , Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi , Qiang Liu

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xuan Tang , Jichu Li , Difan Zou

Optimizers play an important role in both pretraining and finetuning stages when training large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we present an observation that full finetuning with the same optimizer as in pretraining achieves a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuxing Liu , Jianyu Wang , Tong Zhang

Recent developments in deep learning optimization have brought about radically new algorithms based on the Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) framework, such as $\sf Muon$ and $\sf Scion$. After over a decade of $\sf Adam$'s dominance, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Artem Riabinin , Egor Shulgin , Kaja Gruntkowska , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social science simulations. While their performance on reasoning and optimization tasks has been extensively evaluated, less attention has been paid to their ability to simulate human…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Yuanjun Feng , Vivek Choudhary , Yash Raj Shrestha

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Saurabh Page , Advait Joshi , S. S. Sonawane

Lion (Evolved Sign Momentum), a new optimizer discovered through program search, has shown promising results in training large AI models. It performs comparably or favorably to AdamW but with greater memory efficiency. As we can expect from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Lizhang Chen , Bo Liu , Kaizhao Liang , Qiang Liu

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Di Zhang , Yihang Zhang

Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising zero-shot generalization capabilities across various downstream tasks. Recent research has introduced multimodal capabilities to LLMs by integrating independently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Utsav Garg , Erhan Bas

Large Language Models trained on web-scale text acquire language generation abilities that can solve a wide range of tasks, particularly when task knowledge is refined into the generative prior using in-context examples. However, spurious…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Joykirat Singh , Subhabrata Dutta , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Although vision models such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) show impressive generalization performance, their zero-shot robustness is still limited under Out-of-Distribution (OOD) scenarios without fine-tuning. Instead of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Zhuo Huang , Chang Liu , Yinpeng Dong , Hang Su , Shibao Zheng , Tongliang Liu