arXiv AI

Muon as a Residual Connection

arXiv:2607. 01124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as one of the most effective optimizers for training large neural networks, yet its empirical success has been explained from several different perspectives.

arXiv AI
Jul 16

Reassessing Muon for Matrix Factorization

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

Reassessing Muon for Matrix Factorization

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 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
Aug 25

A Physical Response-and-Memory Model for Muon Optimization

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.

By Yinze Hu, Hongjun Xiang, Xingao Gong, Hongyu Yu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Derivative-Free Structured Updates for Muon

The paper introduces a derivative‑free framework for Muon‑style updates, replacing gradient‑based momentum with structured finite differences. Four variants—full entrywise recovery, random low‑rank surrogates, basis‑aligned rank‑one probing, and direct structured search—are explored, with basis‑aligned probing shown to be equivalent to coordinate finite differences up to scaling. Experiments on matrix regression, noisy‑gradient regression, a neural network, and a CartPole task demonstrate that random rank‑one probing can significantly reduce function evaluations, though at the expense of update accuracy, and that accurate function values can sometimes offset unreliable gradient oracles.

By Pengcheng Xie