arXiv Machine Learning By Hua Huang

How Much Orthogonalization Does Muon Need?

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

arXiv:2606. 00371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon optimizers improve neural-network training by replacing ill-conditioned momentum updates with approximately semi-orthogonal updates.

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
Jun 16

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606. 16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings.

By Bishnu Dev (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE), Sushil Bohara (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE), Martin Tak\'a\v{c} (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE), Samuel Horv\'ath (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Abu Dhabi, UAE)
arXiv AI
Aug 25

A Physical Response-and-Memory Model for Muon Optimization

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Variance-Adaptive Muon: Pre-Orthogonalization Variance Modulation for Efficient Language Model Pretraining

The paper introduces two variance‑adaptive variants of the Muon optimizer—Muon‑NSR and Muon‑VS—for language model pretraining. Both methods incorporate gradient‑variance information into Muon’s orthogonalization process without adding extra hyperparameters, preserving its spectral normalization structure. Experiments on Llama‑style and GPT‑2 models ranging from 125 M to 1.2 B parameters show that these variants outperform well‑tuned Muon baselines and achieve up to a 1.33× step‑to‑target speedup on Llama‑1.2B.

By Jingru Li, Yibo Fan, Huan Li