Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become a hallmark of AI for scientific simulation. While efforts on new architectures and datasets have led to increasingly accurate and general models, the choice of optimizer for training has largely remained unexplored, defaulting to Adam and its variants in the community.
arXiv:2607. 02499v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have become a hallmark of AI for scientific simulation.
arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.
arXiv:2606. 27153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Matrix-orthogonalization-based optimizers, exemplified by Muon, have demonstrated strong convergence behavior across a wide range of modern deep learning workloads.
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.
arXiv:2603. 00742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Adam has long been the ubiquitous default optimizer for deep neural networks, Muon has recently seen rapid adoption due to its superior training speed.
MONA is a new optimizer that extends the Muon optimizer by adding a Nesterov‑style acceleration term derived from an exponential moving average of gradient differences. The paper provides a convergence analysis showing that this term offers curvature‑aware corrections while maintaining Muon’s spectral‑norm regularization. Empirical results demonstrate that MONA outperforms both Muon and AdamW on Mixture‑of‑Experts pretraining across models ranging from 1 B to 68 B parameters, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on downstream benchmarks after fine‑tuning the largest model.
Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e. g.
arXiv:2607. 06772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.
arXiv:2602. 00329v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable data attribution is essential for mitigating bias and reducing computational waste in modern machine learning, with the Shapley value serving as the theoretical gold standard.
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.
AF‑Muon is an AdamW‑free extension of the Muon optimizer that retains Muon’s matrix update for hidden weights while applying a support‑aware finite‑cap linear minimization oracle to tied vocabulary tables and an RMS‑normalized update for one‑dimensional auxiliary parameters. This design eliminates second‑moment state, reducing optimizer‑state memory by about 20% compared to Hybrid Muon. Across nine tied‑token settings—including decoder‑only language models, T5‑style encoder‑decoders, and ImageGPT‑style variants—AF‑Muon consistently improves mean validation loss and perplexity over both Hybrid Muon and a SCION‑style Sign endpoint, with robust gains confirmed by long‑horizon runs and hyperparameter studies.
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.