arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Toward a First-Principles Update Geometry for the Language-Model Head

The paper proposes a new update geometry for the language‑model head by treating the head and softmax as a single module and using Hilbert’s projective distance to measure functional change. It replaces the spectral norm with the Euclidean row diameter, derives a tractable RowNorm update rule, and demonstrates that RowNorm substantially reduces step diameters and Hilbert perturbations while only slightly increasing validation loss.

By Aditya Somasundaram, Charles Guille-Escuret, Alexander Moreno, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing
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 AI
Oct 12

From SGD to Muon: Adaptive Optimization via Schatten-p Norms

The paper introduces a data‑driven criterion that dynamically selects optimal Linear Minimization Oracle (LMO) geometries for each layer of a deep neural network, bridging the gap between SGD and Muon updates. By deriving the criterion from gradient and activation statistics via a single‑step random feature regression surrogate, the authors enable a design space that interpolates between existing optimizers, including SGD, Muon, Adam, and MuAdam. The adaptive approach incurs only about a 3% runtime overhead and demonstrates competitive or superior performance compared to the best static optimizer across three training scenarios.

By Thomas Massena (DTIPG - SNCF, IRIT), Corentin Friedrich (IRIT), Mathieu Serrurier (IRIT)