Related papers: When Muon Optimizer Meets Adversarial Training: A …
We propose AdaMuon, a novel optimizer that combines element-wise adaptivity with orthogonal updates for large-scale neural network training. AdaMuon incorporates two tightly coupled mechanisms: (1) an element-wise second momentum estimator…
Sensitivity to adversarial noise hinders deployment of machine learning algorithms in security-critical applications. Although many adversarial defenses have been proposed, robustness to adversarial noise remains an open problem. The most…
Deep neural networks are easily fooled by small perturbations known as adversarial attacks. Adversarial Training (AT) is a technique aimed at learning features robust to such attacks and is widely regarded as a very effective defense.…
Optimizers are crucial for the efficient training of Large Language Models (LLMs). While AdamW is the de facto standard, recent structure-aware optimizers like Muon have emerged, which regularize gradient updates by operating on entire…
We demonstrate that Muon, the simplest instantiation of a second-order optimizer, explicitly expands the Pareto frontier over AdamW on the compute-time tradeoff. We find that Muon is more effective than AdamW in retaining data efficiency at…
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…
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…
The Muon optimizer is consistently faster than Adam in training Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the mechanism underlying its success remains unclear. This paper demystifies this mechanism through the lens of associative memory. By…
In this note, we inspect the convergence of a new optimizer for pretraining LLMs, namely the Muon optimizer. Such an optimizer is closely related to a specialized steepest descent method where the update direction is the minimizer of the…
Adversarial training (AT) is a prominent technique employed by deep learning models to defend against adversarial attacks, and to some extent, enhance model robustness. However, there are three main drawbacks of the existing AT-based…
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…
The AutoAttack (AA) has been the most reliable method to evaluate adversarial robustness when considerable computational resources are available. However, the high computational cost (e.g., 100 times more than that of the project gradient…
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…
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…
Muon has recently emerged as a strong alternative to AdamW for training neural networks, with encouraging large-scale pretraining results and growing evidence that matrix-structured updates can be faster in practice. Yet Muon, and more…
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…
While adversarial training methods have significantly improved the robustness of deep neural networks against norm-bounded adversarial perturbations, the generalization gap between their performance on training and test data is considerably…
Current deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where adversarial perturbations to the inputs can change or manipulate classification. To defend against such attacks, an effective and popular approach, known as…
Despite the success of deep learning-based algorithms, it is widely known that neural networks may fail to be robust. A popular paradigm to enforce robustness is adversarial training (AT), however, this introduces many computational and…
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…