Related papers: Can Muon Fine-tune Adam-Pretrained Models?
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…
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…
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…
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…
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By…
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…
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…
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…
Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling…
We demonstrate that Muon, the simplest instantiation of a second-order optimizer, explicitly expands the Pareto frontier over AdamW on the compute-time tradeoff. We find that Muon is more effective than AdamW in retaining data efficiency at…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization and emergent capabilities, yet their pre-training remains computationally expensive and sensitive to optimization dynamics. While Adam-based optimizers offer fast…
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,…
Muon has emerged as a strong competitor to AdamW for language model pre-training, yet its behavior at scale is sensitive to weight decay. Recent work has observed that, for Muon without decoupled weight decay, the spectral norm of weight…
The Muon optimizer has recently offered a promising alternative to AdamW for large language model training, leveraging matrix orthogonalization to produce geometry-aware updates. However, like all first-order methods, Muon can become…
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…
In this note, we inspect the convergence of a new optimizer for pretraining LLMs, namely the Muon optimizer. Such an optimizer is closely related to a specialized steepest descent method where the update direction is the minimizer of the…
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…
AdamW has long been the dominant optimizer in language model pretraining, despite numerous claims that alternative optimizers offer 1.4 to 2x speedup. We posit that two methodological shortcomings have obscured fair comparisons and hindered…