arXiv Machine Learning

MuLoCo: Muon is a practical inner optimizer for DiLoCo

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 Machine Learning
Jun 9

Convergence Bound and Critical Batch Size of Muon Optimizer

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.

By Naoki Sato, Hiroki Naganuma, Hideaki Iiduka
arXiv AI
Jun 12

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606. 12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines.

By Franz Louis Cesista, Katherine Crowson, C\'edric Simal, Stella Biderman
arXiv AI
Jul 24

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.

By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort
arXiv AI
Jun 29

When Is an LLM Worth It for Hyperparameter Optimization? A Budget-Matched Study on Tabular Data Finds the Warm-Start Is a Default Configuration, Not the Model

arXiv:2606. 21641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as hyperparameter-optimization (HPO) advisors that "warm-start" search from prior knowledge, proposing strong configurations in very few evaluations.

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas, Isaiah Abner DCosta, Nithish Kumar Prabhakaran
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Can Model Merging Improve Aggregation in DiLoCo?

arXiv:2607. 03011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model merging techniques, which aggregate independently finetuned models into one to combine their capabilities, have become a topic of significant interest in recent years, with a broad array of methods having been proposed to tackle this problem.

By Stefan Horoi, Benjamin Th\'erien, Guy Wolf, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

SCAPE: Accurate and Efficient LLM Training with Extreme Sparse Communication

arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.

By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang