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Adaptive gradient methods, e.g. \textsc{Adam}, have achieved tremendous success in machine learning. Scaling the learning rate element-wisely by a certain form of second moment estimate of gradients, such methods are able to attain rapid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Yizhou Wang , Yue Kang , Can Qin , Huan Wang , Yi Xu , Yulun Zhang , Yun Fu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Ben S. Southworth , Stephen Thomas

Matrix-based preconditioned optimizers, such as Muon, have recently been shown to be more efficient than scalar-based optimizers for training large-scale neural networks, including large language models (LLMs). Recent benchmark studies of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yifeng Liu , Angela Yuan , Quanquan Gu

Muon-style optimizers leverage Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations to orthogonalize updates, yielding update geometries that often outperform Adam-series methods. However, this orthogonalization discards magnitude information, rendering training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Peng Cheng , Jiucheng Zang , Qingnan Li , Liheng Ma , Yufei Cui , Yingxue Zhang , Boxing Chen , Ming Jian , Wen Tong

Although deep neural networks have made remarkable achievements in the field of automatic modulation recognition (AMR), these models often require a large amount of labeled data for training. However, in many practical scenarios, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Yao Lu , Hongyu Gao , Zhuangzhi Chen , Dongwei Xu , Yun Lin , Qi Xuan , Guan Gui

The majority of parameters in neural networks are naturally represented as matrices. However, most commonly used optimizers treat these matrix parameters as flattened vectors during optimization, potentially overlooking their inherent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Wei Shen , Ruichuan Huang , Minhui Huang , Cong Shen , Jiawei Zhang

The Muon optimizer has recently attracted considerable attention for its strong empirical performance and use of orthogonalized updates on matrix-shaped parameters, yet its underlying mechanisms and relationship to adaptive optimizers such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Xianbiao Qi , Marco Chen , Jiaquan Ye , Yelin He , Rong Xiao

To define a steepest descent method over a neural network, we need to choose a norm for each layer, a way to aggregate these norms across layers, and whether to use normalization. We systematically explore different alternatives for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Michael Crawshaw , Chirag Modi , Mingrui Liu , Robert M. Gower

Modern Large Language Model (LLM) training is fundamentally bottlenecked by pathologically flat saddle points in extreme high-dimensional landscapes. Motivated by this challenge, we analyze the saddle-point escape dynamics of the emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yanlin Long , Yufei Gu , Zeke Xie

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

Existing learning rate schedules that do not require specification of the optimization stopping step T are greatly out-performed by learning rate schedules that depend on T. We propose an approach that avoids the need for this stopping time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Aaron Defazio , Xingyu Alice Yang , Harsh Mehta , Konstantin Mishchenko , Ahmed Khaled , Ashok Cutkosky

The Muon optimizer, a matrix-structured algorithm that leverages spectral orthogonalization of gradients, is a milestone in the pretraining of large language models. However, the underlying mechanisms of Muon -- particularly the role of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Jianhao Ma , Yu Huang , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Recently, Muon and related spectral optimizers have demonstrated strong empirical performance as scalable stochastic methods, often outperforming Adam. Yet their behaviour remains poorly understood. We analyze stochastic spectral…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-12 Elliot Paquette , Noah Marshall , Lucas Benigni , Guangyuan Wang , Atish Agarwala , Courtney Paquette

Matrix-structured parameters frequently appear in many artificial intelligence models such as large language models. More recently, an efficient Muon optimizer is designed for matrix parameters of large-scale models, and shows markedly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Feihu Huang , Yuning Luo , Songcan Chen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Naoki Sato , Hiroki Naganuma , Hideaki Iiduka

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

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xuan Tang , Jichu Li , Difan Zou

In recent years, Muon has emerged as the dominant method for training large language models, and transformers more broadly. The essential difference, when compared to standard gradient descent methods, is to replace the usual update matrix…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Fangzhou Wu , Rikhav Shah , Sandeep Silwal , Qiuyi Zhang

The vast majority of modern deep learning models are trained with momentum-based first-order optimizers. The momentum term governs the optimizer's memory by determining how much each past gradient contributes to the current convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kristi Topollai , Anna Choromanska

The Muon optimizer has emerged as a compelling alternative to Adam for training large language models, achieving remarkable computational savings through gradient orthogonalization. However, Muon's optimizer state is more sensitive to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yupeng Su , Ruijie Zhang , Ziyue Liu , Yequan Zhao , Zheng Zhang