Related papers: MuonEq: Balancing Before Orthogonalization with Li…
The muon optimizer has picked up much attention as of late as a possible replacement to the seemingly omnipresent Adam optimizer. Recently, care has been taken to document the scaling laws of hyper-parameters under muon such as weight decay…
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…
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.…
Orthogonal matrix has shown advantages in training Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), but such matrix is limited to be square for the hidden-to-hidden transformation in RNNs. In this paper, we generalize such square orthogonal matrix to…
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…
In this article, we introduce a novel normalization technique for neural network weight matrices, which we term weight conditioning. This approach aims to narrow the gap between the smallest and largest singular values of the weight…
Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…
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…
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…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a model for analyzing deep learning optimization over a single iteration by leveraging the matrix structure of the weights. We derive the model by assuming isotropy of curvature, including the second-order…
The increasing size of neural networks has led to a growing demand for methods of efficient fine-tuning. Recently, an orthogonal fine-tuning paradigm was introduced that uses orthogonal matrices for adapting the weights of a pretrained…
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…
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…
To define a steepest descent method over a neural network, we need to choose a norm for each layer, a way to aggregate these norms across layers, and whether to use normalization. We systematically explore different alternatives for…
The ever-growing scale of deep learning models and training data underscores the critical importance of efficient optimization methods. While preconditioned gradient methods such as Adam and AdamW are the de facto optimizers for training…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant advancements, achieving superhuman performance in various tasks. However, RL agents often operate under the assumption of environmental stationarity, which poses a great challenge to learning…
Modern optimizers, like Muon, impose matrix-wise geometry constraints on their updates. These matrix-wise constraints can be unified under Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) theory. However, all current methods impose fixed LMO geometries for…
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,…
Generalisation of a deep neural network (DNN) is one major concern when employing the deep learning approach for solving practical problems. In this paper we propose a new technique, named approximated orthonormal normalisation (AON), to…