Muon Can Outperform Dedicated Continual Learning Methods
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2607. 20512v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Muon optimizer reaches the grokking threshold on modular arithmetic faster than AdamW.
The paper introduces Temperon, a training strategy that uses plain SGD for the first 43% of the epoch budget and then hands off to a SAM‑wrapped Muon refiner for the remaining training. On datasets such as CIFAR‑10/100, SVHN, and Tiny ImageNet, Temperon achieves the same or better accuracy as full‑time SAM while reaching key performance targets faster and at lower cost. Ablation studies show that the Muon refiner contributes the majority of the performance gain, while the initial SGD explorer and its restarts add negligible benefit.
arXiv:2608.27518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) and model merging (MM) both aim to obtain a single model that performs well across multiple tasks, challenged respectively by c...
arXiv:2505. 23725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints.
arXiv:2606. 12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines.
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.