Related papers: MUON+: Towards More Effective Muon via One Additio…
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…
In LLM training, normalization layers and optimizers are typically treated as independent design choices. In a 3x2 factorial at 1B parameters and 1000 training steps, we show this assumption can fail: Dynamic Erf (Derf; Chen & Liu, 2025)…
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…
Muon has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to AdamW for large-scale pre-training, with orthogonalization via Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations as its core operation. Existing Muon variants apply a uniform NS schedule to all…
Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…
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…
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…
Efficient stochastic optimization typically integrates an update direction that performs well in the deterministic regime with a mechanism adapting to stochastic perturbations. While Adam uses adaptive moment estimates to promote stability,…
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…
Recent empirical research has demonstrated that deep learning optimizers based on the linear minimization oracle (LMO) over specifically chosen Non-Euclidean norm balls, such as Muon and Scion, outperform Adam-type methods in the training…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet recent findings reveal that their deeper layers often contribute minimally and can be pruned without affecting overall performance. While some view this as an opportunity…
Pre-training Large Language Models requires immense computational resources, making optimizer efficiency essential. The optimization landscape is highly anisotropic, with loss reduction driven predominantly by progress along flat…
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…
Optimizers are crucial for the efficient training of Large Language Models (LLMs). While AdamW is the de facto standard, recent structure-aware optimizers like Muon have emerged, which regularize gradient updates by operating on entire…
Prompt optimization and fine-tuning are two major approaches to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). They enhance the capabilities of LLMs from complementary perspectives: the former through explicit natural language,…
Improving Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or reinforcement learning (RL), which require expensive and manually annotated multi-modal data--an ultimately…
Post-training improves large language models (LLMs) but often worsens confidence calibration, leading to systematic overconfidence. Recent unsupervised post-hoc methods for post-trained LMs (PoLMs) mitigate this by aligning PoLM confidence…
The Muon optimizer has demonstrated remarkable empirical success in handling matrix-structured parameters for training neural networks. However, a significant gap remains between its practical performance and theoretical understanding.…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. In this work, we demonstrate that the order of training data can lead to significant training imbalances, potentially resulting in…
Pre-trained language models (PrLM) have to carefully manage input units when training on a very large text with a vocabulary consisting of millions of words. Previous works have shown that incorporating span-level information over…