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 identifies a problem called Gradient-Update Mismatch (GUM), where optimizers can alter conflict-free gradient directions produced by gradient surgery, leading to conflicts between physics residual and boundary condition losses in Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). To address this, the authors propose Gradient-Update Alignment (GUA), which projects the optimizer’s update onto the conflict-free cone and adjusts internal optimizer state accordingly. Experiments show GUM is common across many optimizers, and GUA consistently eliminates conflicts and significantly reduces error in PINN training.
By Jing Xiao, Xinhai Chen, Qinglin Wang, Menghan Jia, Zhiquan Lai, Dongsheng Li, Jie Liu, Tiejun Li
arXiv:2606. 22932v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reverse-mode differentiation computes every weight gradient, writes it to memory, and only then lets the optimizer read it back.
By Dikshant Kukreja, Kritarth Prasad, Avinash Anand, Zhengkui Wang, Erik Cambria, Timothy Liu, Aik Beng Ng, Simon See, Bapi Chatterjee
arXiv:2608. 04407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memory-efficient matrix optimizers such as Sinkhorn gradient descent remove most AdamW optimizer state for dense Transformer matrices, but direct application to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training is unreliable.
By Masato Fujitake
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
By Da Chang, Ganzhao Yuan
arXiv:2502. 11034v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining.
By Guoxia Wang, Shuai Li, Congliang Chen, Jinle Zeng, Jiabin Yang, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Li Shen