Related papers: When and Why Grouping Attention Heads Accelerates …

Orthogonalized-momentum optimizers such as Muon improve transformer training by approximately whitening/orthogonalizing matrix-valued momentum updates via a short polar-decomposition iteration. However, polar-factor approximations typically…

Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large language model pre-training, orthogonalizing the momentum matrix via Newton--Schulz polar iterations. A natural intuition is that polar iterations, by flattening the singular…

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…

The majority of parameters in neural networks are naturally represented as matrices. However, most commonly used optimizers treat these matrix parameters as flattened vectors during optimization, potentially overlooking their inherent…

Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization. However, its practical efficiency is limited by the…

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…

Orthogonalized-update optimizers such as Muon improve training of matrix-valued parameters, but existing extensions typically either rescale updates after orthogonalization or use heavier whitening-based preconditioners before it. We…

A range of recent optimizers have emerged that approximate the same "matrix-whitening" transformation in various ways. In this work, we systematically deconstruct such optimizers, aiming to disentangle the key components that explain…

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…

The Muon optimizer has emerged as a compelling alternative to Adam for training large language models, achieving remarkable computational savings through gradient orthogonalization. However, Muon's optimizer state is more sensitive to…

The Muon optimizer enjoys strong empirical performance and theoretical grounding. However, the super-linear cost of its orthonormalization step introduces increasing overhead with scale. To alleviate this cost, several works have attempted…

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, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW. This…

We present a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study of the Muon optimizer for training transformers only with a small to medium decoder (30M - 200M parameters), with an emphasis on its mathematical foundations, convergence properties…

Matrix-structured parameters frequently appear in many artificial intelligence models such as large language models. More recently, an efficient Muon optimizer is designed for matrix parameters of large-scale models, and shows markedly…

Adversarial training (AT) remains one of the most reliable empirical defenses against adversarial attacks. Its robustness critically depends on how the underlying min-max objective is optimized. In practice, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

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 attracted attention due to its orthogonalized first-order updates, and a deeper theoretical understanding of its convergence behavior is essential for guiding practical applications; however, existing…

Muon improves neural-network training by orthogonalizing matrix-valued updates, but it leaves each layer's update magnitude controlled mostly by a global learning rate. We introduce OrScale, a trust-ratio extension of Muon built on a simple…

Muon updates weight matrices along (approximate) polar factors of the gradients and has shown strong empirical performance in large-scale training. Existing attempts at explaining its performance largely focus on single-step comparisons (on…