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Related papers: MiMuon: Mixed Muon Optimizer with Improved General…

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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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Chongyu Fan , Gaowen Liu , Mingyi Hong , Ramana Rao Kompella , Sijia Liu

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.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Yize Zhao , Vatsal Sharan , Christos Thrampoulidis

This paper investigates the impact of different optimizers on the grokking phenomenon, where models exhibit delayed generalization. We conducted experiments across seven numerical tasks (primarily modular arithmetic) using a modern…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Amund Tveit , Bjørn Remseth , Arve Skogvold

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Minxin Zhang , Yuxuan Liu , Hayden Schaeffer

The Muon optimizer enjoys strong empirical performance and theoretical grounding. However, the super-linear cost of its orthonormalization step introduces increasing overhead with scale. To alleviate this cost, several works have attempted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Kwangjun Ahn , Noah Amsel , John Langford

Preconditioned adaptive methods have gained significant attention for training deep neural networks, as they capture rich curvature information of the loss landscape. The central challenge in this field lies in balancing preconditioning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Shenyang Deng , Zhuoli Ouyang , Tianyu Pang , Zihang Liu , Ruochen Jin , Shuhua Yu , Yaoqing Yang

Muon has emerged as an efficient alternative to Adam for pretraining, yet remains underused for fine-tuning. A key obstacle is that most open models are pretrained with Adam, and naively switching to Muon for fine-tuning leads to degraded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xingyu Qu , Peigeng Huang , Samuel Horvath

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 DeMuon, a method for decentralized matrix optimization over a given communication topology. DeMuon incorporates matrix orthogonalization via Newton-Schulz iterations-a technique inherited from its centralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Chuan He , Shuyi Ren , Jingwei Mao , Erik G. Larsson

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Tien-Phat Nguyen , Truong Nguyen , Minh-Phuc Truong , Tuc Nguyen , James Bailey , Trung Le

Software configuration tuning is essential for optimizing a given performance objective (e.g., minimizing latency). Yet, due to the software's intrinsically complex configuration landscape and expensive measurement, there has been a rather…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Pengzhou Chen , Tao Chen , Miqing Li

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Binghang Lu , Zheyuan Deng , Runyu Zhang , Bing Hu , Yunhan Zhao , Yuan Tian , Changhong Mou , Guang Lin , Xiaomin Li

Matrix-based optimizers have demonstrated immense potential in training Large Language Models (LLMs), however, designing an ideal optimizer remains a formidable challenge. A superior optimizer must satisfy three core desiderata: efficiency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Jinghui Yuan , Jiaxuan Zou , Shuo Wang , Yong Liu , Feiping Nie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yixuan Yang , Yuqing He , Song Li

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

Microstructures, i.e., architected materials, are designed today, typically, by maximizing an objective, such as bulk modulus, subject to a volume constraint. However, in many applications, it is often more appropriate to impose constraints…

Materials Science · Physics 2022-07-15 Saketh Sridhara , Aaditya Chandrasekhar , Krishnan Suresh

Muon and its variants have shown strong empirical performance in a variety of deep learning tasks. Existing convergence analyses of Muon rely on smoothness assumptions, though arguably the most successful function class for developing deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Tetiana Parshakova , Ahmed Khaled , Michael Crawshaw , Guillaume Garrigos , Robert M. Gower

Muon-style optimizers take a matrix-valued momentum or preconditioned update $B = U \operatorname{diag}(\sigma_1,\ldots,\sigma_r) V^\top$ and replace it with its canonical partial polar factor $\operatorname{Pol}(B) = U V^\top$. This maps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Albert Yi

The core bottleneck of Federated Learning (FL) lies in the communication rounds. That is, how to achieve more effective local updates is crucial for reducing communication rounds. Existing FL methods still primarily use element-wise local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Junkang Liu , Fanhua Shang , Junchao Zhou , Hongying Liu , Yuanyuan Liu , Jin Liu