arXiv Machine Learning

Temperon: Full-Time SAM Quality at a Third Less Wall-Clock

The paper introduces Temperon, a training strategy that uses plain SGD for the first 43% of the epoch budget and then hands off to a SAM‑wrapped Muon refiner for the remaining training. On datasets such as CIFAR‑10/100, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet, Temperon achieves the same or better accuracy as full‑time SAM while reaching key performance targets faster and at lower cost. Ablation studies show that the Muon refiner contributes the majority of the performance gain, while the initial SGD explorer and its restarts add negligible benefit.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Muon Can Outperform Dedicated Continual Learning Methods

arXiv:2609.24678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) typically mitigates forgetting by penalizing the overlap between a new update and the accumulated past...

By Sebastian George Sincari (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania), Bogdan Alexandru Gheorghe (Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania), Antonio Barbalau (Bitdefender, Bucharest, Romania)
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 24

When does fusing hand-crafted knowledge with learned representations pay? A cost-normalized benchmark of stacking, substitution, and interference

arXiv:2608.21098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or har...

By Ahmad AlMughrabi, Albert Clop, Benjamin Busam, Ricardo Marques, Petia Radeva
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Stiefel Attention: When the Geometry of Transformer Projection Matrices Dominates Optimizer Choice---and When It Does Not

The paper introduces Stiefel Attention, which constrains the query and key projection matrices of transformers to the Stiefel manifold and optimizes them with a Riemannian Adam variant. It demonstrates that this approach yields steepest‑descent updates, is well‑conditioned, and preserves learned attention geometry during weight decay. Empirical results show significant accuracy gains on modular arithmetic grokking and CIFAR‑10 patches, with the improvement attributed to a step‑scale‑free update rule rather than equivariance or projector changes.

By Rub\'en Dar\'io Guerrero