arXiv Machine Learning By Adri\'an Javaloy, Antonio Vergari

An Embarrassingly Simple Way to Optimize Orthogonal Matrices at Scale

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2602. 14656v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Orthogonality constraints are ubiquitous in robust and probabilistic machine learning.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Low-rank Orthogonalization for Large-scale Matrix Optimization with Applications to Foundation Model Training

The paper introduces low‑rank orthogonalization, a technique that exploits the low‑rank nature of gradients in neural network training to perform matrix orthogonalization more efficiently. Building on this, the authors present low‑rank matrix‑signed gradient descent (MSGD) and a low‑rank variant of the Muon optimizer, showing through experiments that low‑rank Muon matches or surpasses vanilla Muon on GPT‑2 and LLaMA pretraining, especially for larger models. Theoretical analysis provides iteration‑complexity bounds for both low‑rank MSGD and low‑rank Muon under heavy‑tailed noise.

By Chuan He, Zhanwang Deng, Zhaosong Lu