arXiv:2609.39595v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Practical Muon maintains momentum and performs a small, fixed number of Newton--Schulz iterations separately for each parameter matrix, often with a Ne...
By Hanyng Peng, Hui Wang, Yue Yu
arXiv:2609.13677v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern real application problems involve matrix-valued parameters, yet conventional optimizers treat them as vectors, thereby motivating matrix-aware...
By Lexiao Lai, Tianyi Lin, Jiayu Zhang
Musec introduces MomentUm SpEctral Clipping, an optimizer-level, architecture‑agnostic technique that replaces Muon’s spectral flattening with selective spectral clipping to stabilize training. By clipping singular values above a threshold while preserving the momentum’s spectral structure, Musec addresses loss spikes and unbounded weight growth without requiring architecture‑specific changes. Soft Musec, an efficient implementation using smooth spectral saturation via coupled Newton‑Schulz iterations, offers convergence guarantees in nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization and empirically improves stability across diverse learning rates and model sizes.
By Zhuanghua Liu, Menglian Wang, Luo Luo
arXiv:2606. 03899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon has recently demonstrated strong empirical performance in large language model training, but the theoretical role of momentum in Muon remains unclear.
By Xianliang Li, Zihan Zhang, Weiyang Liu, Han Bao
arXiv:2608. 12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon, a more recently developed optimizer, is useful for matrix-wise models in AI areas.
By Wang Yan, Feihu Huang
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
The paper analyzes the stochastic optimizer Muon, which orthogonalizes an exponential moving average of minibatch gradients, and compares its behavior to the baseline SignSGD on a high‑dimensional matrix‑valued least squares problem. It derives deterministic dynamics showing Muon’s sensitivity to an effective batch size and its failure to resolve small eigenmodes when whitening is exact and the effective batch is small, while Momentum and finite Newton–Shulz iterations can mitigate this. The study presents a phase diagram in terms of data and target exponents, indicating when Muon or SignSGD is preferable based on covariance spectrum steepness and target loss scaling.
By Elliot Paquette, Noah Marshall, Lucas Benigni, Guangyuan Wang, Atish Agarwala, Courtney Paquette
arXiv:2606. 08783v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Orthogonalized momentum updates, as used in Muon-style optimizers, have recently shown strong empirical stability in large-scale deep learning.
By Ganzhao Yuan
arXiv:2609.07666v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Full-parameter fine-tuning of large language models has substantial memory costs because backpropagation stores activations and gradients. Zeroth-order...
By Yuyang Wang, Haoyu Yao, Pengcheng Xie
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.
By Ziyue Liu, Ruijie Zhang, Zhengyang Wang, Yequan Zhao, Yupeng Su, Zi Yang, Zheng Zhang
arXiv:2509. 14562v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large models recently are widely applied in machine learning, so efficient training of large models has received widespread attention.
By Feihu Huang, Yuning Luo, Songcan Chen
arXiv:2610.20112v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Prior work on implicit bias shows that gradient descent selects the Frobenius max-margin direction on linearly separable problems, whereas Fan et al. (...
By Yongtao Wu, Mahdi Mansouri, Zhenyu Zhu