arXiv Machine Learning By Thang Do, Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen

On MUON optimization: From non-convergence to an error analysis with Polar Express and the Newton-Schulz polynomial from implementations

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arXiv:2608. 04607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods are the standard instruments for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs).

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Convergence Bound and Critical Batch Size of Muon Optimizer

arXiv:2507. 01598v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Muon, a recently proposed optimizer that leverages the inherent matrix structure of neural network parameters, has demonstrated strong empirical performance, indicating its potential as a successor to standard optimizers such as AdamW.

By Naoki Sato, Hiroki Naganuma, Hideaki Iiduka
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Low-rank Orthogonalization for Large-scale Matrix Optimization with Applications to Foundation Model Training

The paper introduces low‑rank orthogonalization, a technique that exploits the low‑rank nature of gradients in neural network training to perform matrix orthogonalization more efficiently. Building on this, the authors present low‑rank matrix‑signed gradient descent (MSGD) and a low‑rank variant of the Muon optimizer, showing through experiments that low‑rank Muon matches or surpasses vanilla Muon on GPT‑2 and LLaMA pretraining, especially for larger models. Theoretical analysis provides iteration‑complexity bounds for both low‑rank MSGD and low‑rank Muon under heavy‑tailed noise.

By Chuan He, Zhanwang Deng, Zhaosong Lu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Muon with Finite Newton-Schulz: The Smoothing Benefit in Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization

The paper introduces Muon, an optimizer that uses a finite number of Newton‑Schulz iterations to approximate the polar factor for matrix‑valued parameters in large language model pretraining. It demonstrates that this finite iteration smooths the discontinuous polar map into a Lipschitz function of singular values, enabling a conversion from online learning regret to a stationarity guarantee in nonsmooth nonconvex optimization. The authors prove that a logarithmic depth in Newton‑Schulz suffices for convergence to stationary points, matching best‑known sample complexity bounds and extending the result to other spectral maps with similar smoothing properties.

By Mingyi Li, Taira Tsuchiya