Related papers: Muon with Spectral Guidance: Efficient Optimizatio…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…

Distributed training of large neural networks is bottlenecked by full-precision gradient communication and by coordinatewise optimizers that ignore the matrix structure of weight tensors. We propose Sign-Muon, a 1-bit, matrix-aware…

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 emerged as a strong competitor to AdamW for language model pre-training, yet its behavior at scale is sensitive to weight decay. Recent work has observed that, for Muon without decoupled weight decay, the spectral norm of weight…

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…

In large-scale optimization, the cheapness and effectiveness of update steps are the most crucial factors for a successful optimizer. Sign-based optimizers like Lion or Signum produce cheap per-step updates, whereas Muon's spectral…

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…

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 offered a promising alternative to AdamW for large language model training, leveraging matrix orthogonalization to produce geometry-aware updates. However, like all first-order methods, Muon can become…

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…

We propose AdaMuon, a novel optimizer that combines element-wise adaptivity with orthogonal updates for large-scale neural network training. AdaMuon incorporates two tightly coupled mechanisms: (1) an element-wise second momentum estimator…

Gradient orthogonalization is a simple strategy that shows great utility in speeding up gradient descent. The Muon optimizer (Jordan, Jin, et al., 2024) combines gradient orthogonalization with first-order momentum and achieves significant…

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…

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…

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…

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…