Related papers: SignMuon: Communication-Efficient Distributed Muon…
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…
Muon has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to AdamW for large-scale pre-training, with orthogonalization via Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations as its core operation. Existing Muon variants apply a uniform NS schedule to all…
It is well-known that stochastic gradient noise (SGN) acts as implicit regularization for deep learning and is essentially important for both optimization and generalization of deep networks. Some works attempted to artificially simulate…
We consider centralized distributed optimization in the classical federated learning setup, where $n$ workers jointly find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point of an $L$-smooth, $d$-dimensional nonconvex function $f$, having access only to…
Sign-based algorithms (e.g. signSGD) have been proposed as a biased gradient compression technique to alleviate the communication bottleneck in training large neural networks across multiple workers. We show simple convex counter-examples…
Muon has recently shown promising results in LLM training. In this work, we study how to further improve Muon. We argue that Muon's orthogonalized update rule suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes the…
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…
Scaling neural network training increasingly depends on synchronous data-parallelism, yet full-precision gradient all-reduce imposes a severe communication bottleneck. We propose Decoupled Momentum Optimization (DeMo), a drop-in replacement…
The recent empirical success of the Muon optimizer has renewed interest in non-Euclidean optimization, typically justified by similarities with second-order methods, and linear minimization oracle (LMO) theory. In this paper, we challenge…
Modern deep learning commonly relies on AdamW with prescribed learning rate schedules, but recent works challenge both components: Schedule-Free optimization removes explicit schedules via iterate averaging, and Muon improves the update…
Gradient normalization stabilizes deep-learning optimization, and spectral normalizations are especially natural for matrix-shaped parameter blocks; Muon is the motivating example. We study an idealized deterministic, continuous-time,…
Conventional wisdom in deep learning optimization dictates updating all layers at every step-a principle followed by all recent state-of-the-art optimizers such as Muon. In this work, we challenge this assumption, showing that full-network…
We consider distributed optimization over a $d$-dimensional space, where $K$ remote clients send coded gradient estimates over an {\em additive Gaussian Multiple Access Channel (MAC)} with noise variance $\sigma_z^2$. Furthermore, the…
A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest…
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…
Muon orthogonalizes matrix updates, but multi-head attention naturally operates at the level of heads. This granularity mismatch raises the question of whether Muon should be applied to the full attention projection, to individual heads, or…
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…
Recently, several instances of non-Euclidean SGD, including SignSGD, Lion, and Muon, have attracted significant interest from the optimization community due to their practical success in training deep neural networks. Consequently, a number…
In this paper, we propose a novel transmission scheme, called sparse layered MIMO (SL-MIMO), that combines non-orthogonal transmission and singular value decomposition (SVD) precoding. Nonorthogonality in SL-MIMO allows re-using of the…
As language models scale to trillions of parameters, distributed training across many GPUs becomes essential, yet gradient synchronization over high-bandwidth, low-latency networks remains a critical bottleneck. While recent methods like…