The paper introduces LITE, a strategy that accelerates large language model pre‑training by enhancing dynamics along flat directions in the optimization landscape. It builds on a Riemannian ODE framework to interpret adaptive optimizers, then applies larger Hessian damping coefficients and learning rates to improve convergence. Experiments show LITE speeds up Muon and SOAP across various architectures, scales, datasets, and learning‑rate schedules.
By Shuchen Zhu, Rizhen Hu, Mingze Wang, Mou Sun, Xue Wang, Kun Yuan, Zaiwen Wen
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:2608. 05088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as a promising alternative to AdamW for language model pretraining by orthogonalizing momentum matrices using Newton-Schulz iterations.
By Tongle Wu, Huanyu Dong, Ying Sun, Ziye Ma
arXiv:2610.31728v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Muon has become a popular optimizer for large language model training, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we study...
By Xiaoran Chen, Binghui Li, Liwei Wang, Pinyan Lu
arXiv:2512. 04632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Orthogonality-based optimizers, such as Muon, have recently shown strong performance across large-scale training and community-driven efficiency challenges.
By Thibaut Boissin (IRIT-MISFIT), Thomas Massena (DTIPG - SNCF, IRIT-MISFIT), Franck Mamalet (IRIT-MISFIT), Mathieu Serrurier (IRIT-MISFIT)
arXiv:2605. 22432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern deep learning commonly relies on AdamW with prescribed learning rate schedules, but recent works challenge both components: Schedule-Free optimization removes explicit schedules via iterate averaging, and Muon improves the update geometry by orthogonalizing momentum for matrix parameters.
By Jueun Kim, Baekrok Shin, Jihun Yun, Beomhan Baek, Minhak Song, Chulhee Yun