arXiv Machine Learning By Pierfrancesco Beneventano, Mahmoud Abdelmoneum, Tomaso Poggio

The Spectral Dynamics and Noise Geometry of Muon

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arXiv:2606. 08388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon replaces a matrix gradient $G=U\Sigma V^\top$ by its polar factor $UV^\top$.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

Musec: MomentUm SpEctral Clipping for Stable Muon-type Training

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
arXiv Machine Learning
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Spectral Allocation: Why Muon Outperforms Adam, and How to Improve Muon

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