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