Physical Muon: Orthogonalization as an Equilibrium Computation
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: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.
arXiv:2604. 09967v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Muon has emerged as a promising optimizer for large-scale foundation model pre-training by exploiting the matrix structure of neural network updates through iterative orthogonalization.
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.
arXiv:2608.20818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The matrix-aware optimizer Muon improves large model training by balancing updates across singular directions, yet its scaling behavior and end-to-en...
arXiv:2606. 00371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon optimizers improve neural-network training by replacing ill-conditioned momentum updates with approximately semi-orthogonal updates.
arXiv:2608. 03941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is a recent optimizer that orthogonalizes the update to each weight matrix with a Newton-Schulz iteration, which performs steepest descent under the spectral norm.