arXiv:2607. 19771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muon and related matrix-sign optimizers are increasingly used to pre-train large language models, but their effect on the internal geometry of individual weight matrices is not well understood.
By Jiachun Li
arXiv:2602. 05725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Muon updates matrix parameters via the matrix sign of the gradient and has shown strong empirical gains, yet its dynamics and scaling behavior remain unclear in theory.
By Binghui Li, Kaifei Wang, Han Zhong, Pinyan Lu, Liwei Wang
arXiv:2606. 13867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an increasingly widely used optimizer that replaces a gradient $G=USV^\top$ with its polar factor $UV^\top$, thereby flattening the singular spectrum.
By Yihe Dong, Will Sawin
arXiv:2605. 17109v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, Muon has emerged as the dominant method for training large language models, and transformers more broadly.
By Fangzhou Wu, Rikhav Shah, Sandeep Silwal, Qiuyi Zhang
Musec introduces MomentUm SpEctral Clipping, an optimizer-level, architecture‑agnostic technique that replaces Muon’s spectral flattening with selective spectral clipping to stabilize training. By clipping singular values above a threshold while preserving the momentum’s spectral structure, Musec addresses loss spikes and unbounded weight growth without requiring architecture‑specific changes. Soft Musec, an efficient implementation using smooth spectral saturation via coupled Newton‑Schulz iterations, offers convergence guarantees in nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization and empirically improves stability across diverse learning rates and model sizes.
By Zhuanghua Liu, Menglian Wang, Luo Luo
The paper investigates why the orthogonal optimiser Muon outperforms Adam in large language model pretraining by analysing the spectral properties of Transformer loss landscapes. It finds that Muon’s momentum buffers exhibit an anisotropic spectral profile with a volatile head and a tolerant bulk, enabling larger effective step sizes. Building on this insight, the authors propose Spectral‑Aware Muon (SAMuon) and a lightweight variant, which adjust the bulk scaling while keeping the head unchanged, achieving 13–24 % fewer training tokens than Muon without extra FLOPs.
By Xiaodong Wu, Wenyi Yu, Chao Zhang, Philip Woodland