English
Related papers

Related papers: Dimension-Free Saddle-Point Escape in Muon

200 papers

The Muon optimizer has rapidly emerged as a powerful, geometry-aware alternative to AdamW, demonstrating strong performance in large-scale training of neural networks. However, a critical theory-practice disconnect exists: Muon's efficiency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Egor Shulgin , Sultan AlRashed , Francesco Orabona , Peter Richtárik

In this paper, we propose a new adaptive stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (ASGLD) algorithmic framework and its two specialized versions, namely adaptive stochastic gradient (ASG) and adaptive gradient Langevin dynamics(AGLD), for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Hejian Sang , Jia Liu

Bilevel optimization is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning and optimization. Recent theoretical developments in bilevel optimization focus on finding the first-order stationary points for nonconvex-strongly-convex cases. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Minhui Huang , Xuxing Chen , Kaiyi Ji , Shiqian Ma , Lifeng Lai

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet pretraining is computationally demanding, making optimizer efficiency an important practical consideration. Muon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Jingru Li , Yibo Fan , Huan Li

Large models recently are widely applied in artificial intelligence, so efficient training of large models has received widespread attention. More recently, a useful Muon optimizer is specifically designed for matrix-structured parameters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Feihu Huang , Yuning Luo , Songcan Chen

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

The proliferation of saddle points, rather than poor local minima, is increasingly understood to be a primary obstacle in large-scale non-convex optimization for machine learning. Variable elimination algorithms, like Variable Projection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Gan , Guang-Yong Chen , Yang Yi , Lin Yang

We consider non-convex optimization problems with constraint that is a product of simplices. A commonly used algorithm in solving this type of problem is the Multiplicative Weights Update (MWU), an algorithm that is widely used in game…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-26 Yi Feng , Ioannis Panageas , Xiao Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Zichong Li , Liming Liu , Chen Liang , Weizhu Chen , Tuo Zhao

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Thomas Massena , Corentin Friedrich , Mathieu Serrurier

We study generalized smoothness in nonconvex optimization, focusing on $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness and anisotropic smoothness. The former was empirically derived from practical neural network training examples, while the latter arises naturally…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-22 Alexander Bodard , Panagiotis Patrinos

Recent work has shown that stochastically perturbed gradient methods can efficiently escape strict saddle points of smooth functions. We extend this body of work to nonsmooth optimization, by analyzing an inexact analogue of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-21 Damek Davis , Mateo Díaz , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Shuchen Zhu , Rizhen Hu , Mingze Wang , Mou Sun , Xue Wang , Kun Yuan , Zaiwen Wen

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-19 Xun Qian , Hussein Rammal , Dmitry Kovalev , Peter Richtárik

In this paper, we provide some analysis on the asymptotic escape of strict saddles in manifold optimization using the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm. One of our main contributions is that we extend the current analysis to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Thomas Y. Hou , Zhenzhen Li , Ziyun Zhang

For a long period of time, Adam has served as the ubiquitous default choice for training deep neural networks. Recently, many new optimizers have been introduced, out of which Muon has perhaps gained the highest popularity due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Sara Dragutinović , Rajesh Ranganath

High-dimensional datasets are frequently subject to contamination by outliers and heavy-tailed noise, which can severely bias standard regularized estimators like the Lasso. While Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) has recently been introduced…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-02-25 Xiaoning Kang , Lulu Kang

Large language models based on the Transformer architecture have demonstrated impressive capabilities to learn in context. However, existing theoretical studies on how this phenomenon arises are limited to the dynamics of a single layer of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-04 Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) is increasingly constrained by memory and deployment costs, motivating compression methods for practical deployment. Many state-of-the-art compression pipelines leverage the low-rank…

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Minxin Zhang , Yuxuan Liu , Hayden Schaeffer