The paper studies matrices built from block‑diagonal factors interleaved with fixed permutations, a structured family useful in deep learning for balancing expressivity and efficiency. By applying Riemannian geometry, the authors determine when this class forms a smooth manifold and develop Riemannian tools for the orthogonal two‑factor case. They propose efficient algorithms that use automatic differentiation, allow parameter sharing, and avoid dense matrix construction, testing them on matrix approximation and fine‑tuning large language models, while also exploring properties of factorizations with more factors.
By Ali Aliev, Maxim Rakhuba
Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training. Its empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work that interprets Muon as steepest descent under the spectral norm.
arXiv:2607. 13246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon has recently emerged as a strong optimizer for large-scale deep learning, where it reshapes gradient updates through approximate orthogonalization and has been reported to outperform Adam and AdamW in large language model training.
By Ali Parviz, Gal Mishne, Alex Cloninger
arXiv:2509. 07963v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The core component of attention is the scoring function, which transforms the inputs into low-dimensional queries and keys and takes the dot product of each pair.
By Yilun Kuang, Noah Amsel, Sanae Lotfi, Shikai Qiu, Andres Potapczynski, Andrew Gordon Wilson
arXiv:2608. 15665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables backpropagation-free fine-tuning of large language models, but existing ZO methods suffer from high-variance gradient estimators, making convergence unstable and highly sensitive to learning rates.
By Ziming Yu, Shuyao Xiao, Xingyu Zhao, Sike Wang, Pan Zhou, Peiyu Zang, Xiangda Yan, Yongjie Yang, Jia Li
arXiv:2602. 12429v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges.
By Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky