arXiv AI 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

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

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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.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Optimizer Memory Schedules for Outscaling the Overtraining Axis

The paper studies how different optimizers perform as training duration (overtraining) increases, focusing on matrix‑preconditioned methods (Muon, SOAP) and a momentum‑scheduled method (ADANA) compared to AdamW. Across models ranging from 51M to 253M parameters and overtraining factors up to 256×, the authors find that optimal learning‑rate schedules, weight‑decay coefficients, and memory settings shift with horizon, and that ADANA consistently outperforms AdamW, especially with log‑time weight decay and momentum cooldown. Muon and SOAP maintain roughly constant token‑efficiency advantages, with SOAP potentially improving at the highest overtraining levels.

By Katie Everett, Shikai Qiu
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 23

MONA: Muon Optimizer with Nesterov Acceleration for Scalable Language Model Training

MONA is a new optimizer that extends the Muon optimizer by adding a Nesterov‑style acceleration term derived from an exponential moving average of gradient differences. The paper provides a convergence analysis showing that this term offers curvature‑aware corrections while maintaining Muon’s spectral‑norm regularization. Empirical results demonstrate that MONA outperforms both Muon and AdamW on Mixture‑of‑Experts pretraining across models ranging from 1 B to 68 B parameters, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on downstream benchmarks after fine‑tuning the largest model.

By Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Hongtao Xu, Jiaqi Zhang, Yifan Lu, Yerui Sun, Yuchen Xie, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Jun 15

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

arXiv:2606. 13894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory.

By Nadav Benedek, Tomer Koren, Ohad Fried