arXiv AI

Taming Softmax at the Limits of Muon: A Unified Approach through Hilbert Geometry

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Toward a First-Principles Update Geometry for the Language-Model Head

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.

By Aditya Somasundaram, Charles Guille-Escuret, Alexander Moreno, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing
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
5d ago

MuonGS: Pretraining LLMs with Relaxed Weight-Norm Control

The paper introduces MuonGS, a variant of the Muon optimizer that employs Gram–Schmidt projection to remove the radial component of updates, thereby controlling weight norm growth without fixing it. By ensuring the weight norm grows at most proportionally to √{t}, MuonGS achieves a cumulative effective learning rate of ≥√{T} and an O(T^{-1/2}) stationarity guarantee for smooth scale‑invariant objectives. Experiments on 160M‑ and 400M‑parameter dense models and a 135M‑active/1B‑total MoE model show MuonGS attains lower validation perplexity than MuonH and an estimated token‑equivalent speedup of up to ~15% at matched validation loss.

By Athanasios Glentis, Dawei Li, Mingyi Hong
arXiv AI
Oct 12

From SGD to Muon: Adaptive Optimization via Schatten-p Norms

The paper introduces a data‑driven criterion that dynamically selects optimal Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) geometries for each layer of a deep neural network, bridging the gap between SGD and Muon updates. By deriving the criterion from gradient and activation statistics via a single‑step random feature regression surrogate, the authors enable a design space that interpolates between existing optimizers, including SGD, Muon, Adam, and MuAdam. The adaptive approach incurs only about a 3% runtime overhead and demonstrates competitive or superior performance compared to the best static optimizer across three training scenarios.

By Thomas Massena (DTIPG - SNCF, IRIT), Corentin Friedrich (IRIT), Mathieu Serrurier (IRIT)