Related papers: MuonQ: Enhancing Low-Bit Muon Quantization via Dir…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Language Models (LLMs) are often quantized to lower precision to reduce the memory cost and latency in inference. However, quantization often degrades model performance, thus fine-tuning is required for various down-stream tasks.…
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…
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…
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…
Orthogonal momentum gradient updates have emerged to overcome the limitations of vector-based optimizers like Adam. The vector-based optimizer Adam suffers from high memory costs and ill-conditioned momentum gradient updates. However,…
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…
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…
A central challenge in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) is catastrophic forgetting, where adapting to new tasks can substantially degrade performance on previously learned ones. Existing projection-based methods mitigate…
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the natural language processing paradigm but impose substantial demands on memory and computational resources. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce memory…
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…
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 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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) enable advanced natural language processing but face deployment challenges on resource-constrained edge devices due to high computational, memory, and energy demands. Optimizing these models requires addressing…
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…
Quantization is a technique for creating efficient Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which involves performing computations and storing tensors at lower bit-widths than f32 floating point precision. Quantization reduces model size and inference…
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…