arXiv:2606. 25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object.
arXiv:2607. 22444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For scale-invariant deep networks, Hyperball-style optimizers have shown strong performance in large-scale training by fixing the norms of matrix-valued parameters and normalizing updates.
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:2606. 00371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon optimizers improve neural-network training by replacing ill-conditioned momentum updates with approximately semi-orthogonal updates.
The paper introduces two variance‑adaptive variants of the Muon optimizer—Muon‑NSR and Muon‑VS—for language model pretraining. Both methods incorporate gradient‑variance information into Muon’s orthogonalization process without adding extra hyperparameters, preserving its spectral normalization structure. Experiments on Llama‑style and GPT‑2 models ranging from 125 M to 1.2 B parameters show that these variants outperform well‑tuned Muon baselines and achieve up to a 1.33× step‑to‑target speedup on Llama‑1.2B.
arXiv:2607. 17620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes finetuning large language models cheaper by adding to each weight matrix a trainable low-rank update parameterized as the product of two matrices.
arXiv:2609.36692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Matrix optimizers have emerged as a promising direction, with Muon standing out as a prominent design. Revisiting Muon through its full-Gram represen...
arXiv:2604. 09967v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization.
arXiv:2606. 16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay.
arXiv:2606. 27216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon-type optimizers construct update directions for dense neural-network weights by applying a finite Newton-Schulz map to momentum-gradient matrices.
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.
The article surveys recent neural‑network optimizers, noting that the field has moved beyond simple Adam variants to encompass matrix‑ and layer‑level designs, time‑policy horizons, and state representations that survive sharding and low‑precision computation. It categorizes optimizers along four axes—temporal estimation, update geometry, horizon management, and representation & systems—highlighting methods such as Muon, Shampoo, SOAP, and quantized states. The survey concludes that while matrix‑aware methods are a genuine advance, no single optimizer universally replaces AdamW, and performance depends on model scale, data‑to‑parameter ratio, batch size, schedule, partitioning, tuning budget, and target metric.