The paper proposes a new update geometry for the language‑model head by treating the head and softmax as a single module and using Hilbert’s projective distance to measure functional change. It replaces the spectral norm with the Euclidean row diameter, derives a tractable RowNorm update rule, and demonstrates that RowNorm substantially reduces step diameters and Hilbert perturbations while only slightly increasing validation loss.
arXiv:2607. 19771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon and related matrix-sign optimizers are increasingly used to pre-train large language models, but their effect on the internal geometry of individual weight matrices is not well understood.
arXiv:2505. 23725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints.
arXiv:2607. 20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Muon optimizer reaches the grokking threshold on modular arithmetic faster than AdamW.
The paper investigates why the orthogonal optimiser Muon outperforms Adam in large language model pretraining by analysing the spectral properties of Transformer loss landscapes. It finds that Muon’s momentum buffers exhibit an anisotropic spectral profile with a volatile head and a tolerant bulk, enabling larger effective step sizes. Building on this insight, the authors propose Spectral‑Aware Muon (SAMuon) and a lightweight variant, which adjust the bulk scaling while keeping the head unchanged, achieving 13–24 % fewer training tokens than Muon without extra FLOPs.
The paper introduces a physical response-and-memory model for the Muon optimizer, explaining its semi‑orthogonalized momentum update as the maximally dissipative direction under an output‑side safety budget. It treats the weight matrix as a responsive medium with internal stress, showing that momentum corresponds to accumulated stress whose relaxation occurs over multiple timescales—fast and slow. Based on this, the authors propose the Bi‑Maxwell optimizer, which uses a two‑timescale memory kernel and achieves target loss in fewer steps on a public large‑language‑model benchmark.
arXiv:2605.07815v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Muon fixes the \emph{direction} of every matrix-valued update at the polar factor of its momentum, while each layer's step \emph{magnitude} is addr...
arXiv:2507. 01598v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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.
arXiv:2608. 28150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Which geometry controls the rank complexity of normalized softmax attention?
arXiv:2607. 05872v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory-efficient optimizers such as GaLore train large language models by projecting gradients onto a rank-r subspace recomputed every T steps, assuming this subspace is a slowly drifting object that can be tracked.
arXiv:2608. 25807v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) replace fixed activations in deep architectures with learnable univariate edge functions, making the choice of edge parametrisation central.
arXiv:2605. 17109v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, Muon has emerged as the dominant method for training large language models, and transformers more broadly.
arXiv:2608. 26052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Choosing the rank of a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) update is usually an empirical task.