Related papers: Phases of Muon: When Muon Eclipses SignSGD
Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD and Muon, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in training large foundation models. Despite this empirical success, we still lack a theoretical…
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…
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…
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…
Spectral optimizers such as Muon have recently shown strong empirical performance in large-scale language model training, but the source and extent of their advantage remain poorly understood. We study this question through the linear…
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…
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…
The growing adoption of spectrum-aware matrix-valued optimizers such as Muon and Shampoo in deep learning motivates a systematic study of their generalization properties and, in particular, when they might outperform competitive algorithms.…
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…
The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for…
While adaptive gradient methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning, sign-based optimization algorithms such as Lion and Muon have recently demonstrated superior empirical performance over AdamW in training large language models…
Training large neural networks requires distributing learning across multiple workers, where the cost of communicating gradients can be a significant bottleneck. signSGD alleviates this problem by transmitting just the sign of each…
The Muon optimizer has recently demonstrated remarkable empirical success in training large language models. However, the theoretical understanding of its mechanisms remains limited. Current convergence guarantees for Muon rely heavily on…
Various gradient compression schemes have been proposed to mitigate the communication cost in distributed training of large scale machine learning models. Sign-based methods, such as signSGD, have recently been gaining popularity because of…
The Adam optimizer is widely used for transformer optimization in practice, which makes understanding the underlying optimization mechanisms an important problem. However, due to the Adam's complexity, theoretical analysis of how it…