Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training. Its empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work that interprets Muon as steepest descent under the spectral norm.
arXiv:2607. 13246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training.
By Ali Parviz, Gal Mishne, Alex Cloninger
arXiv:2509. 07963v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The core component of attention is the scoring function, which transforms the inputs into low-dimensional queries and keys and takes the dot product of each pair.
By Yilun Kuang, Noah Amsel, Sanae Lotfi, Shikai Qiu, Andres Potapczynski, Andrew Gordon Wilson
arXiv:2608. 15665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables backpropagation-free fine-tuning of large language models, but existing ZO methods suffer from high-variance gradient estimators, making convergence unstable and highly sensitive to learning rates.
By Ziming Yu, Shuyao Xiao, Xingyu Zhao, Sike Wang, Pan Zhou, Peiyu Zang, Xiangda Yan, Yongjie Yang, Jia Li
arXiv:2602. 12429v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges.
By Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv:2608. 16760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable optimization is central to neural network (NN) training, yet Adam, the default optimizer for modern LLMs, rests on a fragile foundation.
By Yushun Zhang
arXiv:2606. 01216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The elementwise Hadamard product of two low-rank matrices provides a parameter-efficient model for data with multiplicative structure, but its modeling is challenging due to the presence of additional symmetries under coupled row/column scalings between the two factors.
By Pratik Jawanpuria, Ankish Chandresh, Bamdev Mishra
arXiv:2606. 02857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a memory-efficient alternative to backpropagation for fine-tuning large language models, but its deployment is limited by the high variance of gradient estimation.
By Liyan Tan, Yequan Zhao, Yifan Yang, Ruijie Zhang, Xinling Yu, Zheng Zhang
arXiv:2607. 25299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization over the Stiefel manifold plays a significant role in various machine learning tasks.
By Yuan Zhang, Jiang Hu, Zhijian Lai, Lin Lin, Zaiwen Wen
arXiv:2606. 14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties.
By Chenxiang Zhang, Rustem Islamov, Enea Monzio Compagnoni, Jun Pang, Aurelien Lucchi, Antonio Orvieto
arXiv:2606. 16454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables efficient adaptation of large pre-trained models to downstream tasks by parameterizing weight updates with low-rank matrices.
By Junghun Oh, Sungyong Baik, Kyoung Mu Lee
arXiv:2601. 04710v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation.
By Feihu Jin, Shipeng Cen, Ying Tan