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.
By Vincent Chen, Starrick Liu, Regis Cheng, Dance Yang, Shalfun Li, Ryan Yu, Lucy Liang, Hang Su, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang
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.
By Arash Lagzian, Paniz Halvachi, Junming Zhang, Zhouhan Lin, Dianbo Liu
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.
By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort
The paper introduces TACO, a new optimizer for fine‑tuning large language models that drastically reduces optimizer state memory while preserving first‑order gradients. TACO selects the sign of the largest magnitude entry in each column of weight matrices, achieving a 174× reduction in persistent optimizer memory compared to AdamW8bit and a 2.9× decrease in peak training memory on OPT‑13B. This allows full‑parameter fine‑tuning of 30–32B‑parameter models on a single 80 GB GPU across multiple model families and tasks, with comparable accuracy and runtime to existing methods.
By Jichao Jiang (University of Central Florida), Cristian McGee (University of Central Florida), El Houcine Bergou (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University), Hanqin Cai (University of Central Florida), Aritra Dutta (University of Central Florida)
arXiv:2607. 17620v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) makes finetuning large language models cheaper by adding to each weight matrix a trainable low-rank update parameterized as the product of two matrices.
By Nikhil Ghosh, Tetiana Parshakova, Robert M. Gower
arXiv:2606. 04662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon improves training efficiency over Adam in large language-model training by about two times, but the local geometric source of this advantage remains unclear.
By Shuche Wang, Fengzhuo Zhang, Jiaxiang Li, Dirk Bergemann, Zhuoran Yang