SignSGD provably beats SGD by a factor of d under sparse noise via matched ℓ1-norm upper and lower bounds, with an equivalent result for Muon on matrices, and this predicts faster GPT-2 pretraining.
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On the Convergence Analysis of Muon
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abstract
The majority of parameters in neural networks are naturally represented as matrices. However, most commonly used optimizers treat these matrix parameters as flattened vectors during optimization, potentially overlooking their inherent structural properties. Recently, an optimizer called Muon has been proposed, specifically designed to optimize matrix-structured parameters. Extensive empirical evidence shows that Muon can significantly outperform traditional optimizers when training neural networks. Nonetheless, the theoretical understanding of Muon's convergence behavior and the reasons behind its superior performance remain limited. In this work, we present a comprehensive convergence rate analysis of Muon and its comparison with Gradient Descent (GD). We characterize the conditions under which Muon can outperform GD. Our theoretical results reveal that Muon can benefit from the low-rank structure of Hessian matrices, a phenomenon widely observed in practical neural network training. Our experimental results support and corroborate the theoretical findings.
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AMUSE is a new optimizer integrating Muon orthogonalization with Schedule-Free averaging via adaptive interpolation for schedule-free anytime training that improves Pareto frontiers on vision and LLM tasks.
DP-Muon adapts matrix-orthogonalized momentum optimization to differential privacy via per-matrix clipping and noise addition, with proofs of inherited privacy and optimization guarantees plus a bias-corrected version that improves private fine-tuning utility.
Spectral clipping of leading singular values in gradient matrices stabilizes SGD for non-convex problems with heavy-tailed noise and achieves the optimal convergence rate O(K^{(2-2α)/(3α-2)}).
On power-law covariance least squares problems, SignSVD (Muon) and SignSGD (Adam proxy) show three phases of relative performance depending on data exponent α and target exponent β.
Intrinsic Muon provides closed-form linear maximization oracles on multiple Riemannian matrix manifolds for unitarily invariant norms, with convergence rates depending only on manifold dimension or rank.
Muon with Nesterov momentum and inexact polar decomposition achieves optimal convergence rates of O(ε^(-(3α-2)/(α-1))) under heavy-tailed noise for ε-stationary points in non-convex settings.
SOAP and its generalizations with arbitrary orthogonal projections converge at a provable rate when the projections are conditionally independent of the current gradient.
Muon achieves higher storage capacity than SGD and matches Newton's method in one-step recovery rates for associative memory under power-law distributions, while saturating at larger critical batch sizes and showing faster initial multi-step dynamics.
Muon-MVR2 attains the optimal anytime convergence rate of ~O(T^{-1/3}) in stochastic non-convex settings under horizon-free schedules.
LionMuon alternates Lion sign steps and Muon spectral steps with shared dual-EMA momentum to match Lion memory while outperforming both at P=2 on 124M-720M models, backed by heavy-tailed complexity bounds that predict the optimal period.
Muon does not converge on convex Lipschitz functions regardless of learning rate, while error feedback restores theoretical convergence but degrades performance on CIFAR-10 and nanoGPT tasks.
Muon-OGD introduces a spectral-norm constrained orthogonal projection method solved via dual iterations and Newton-Schulz approximations to improve stability-plasticity trade-off in sequential LLM adaptation.
ZAYA1-8B is a reasoning MoE model with 700M active parameters that matches larger models on math and coding benchmarks and reaches 91.9% on AIME'25 via Markovian RSA test-time compute.
SignMuon merges majority-vote sign aggregation from signSGD with Muon's polar-factor steps to create a communication-efficient distributed optimizer that matches signSGD rates under symmetric noise and shows strong empirical results on CIFAR and nanoGPT.
SUDA-Muon modularizes decentralized Muon via the SUDA template, proving a topology-separated convergence rate of O((1+σ/√N)K^{-1/4}) in nuclear-norm geometry while establishing that tracking-before-polarization is required to avoid non-stationary fixed points and that local-polarize-then-average is
MuonEq introduces pre-orthogonalization equilibration schemes that improve Muon optimizer performance during large language model pretraining.
SF-NorMuon is a new schedule-free spectral optimizer that closes the gap with tuned AdamW on 125M-772M parameter models across 1-8x Chinchilla horizons while providing stationarity guarantees.
MiMuon is a hybrid optimizer that achieves a generalization error bound of O(1/N) independent of the small singular-value gap that limits the original Muon bound, while retaining the same O(1/T^{1/4}) convergence rate.
Zeroth-order optimization is underexplored rather than underpowered in deep learning, with limitations stemming from full-space designs that can be addressed via subspace, spectral, and systems-aware approaches.
Compressed Gluon variants using unbiased/contraction compressors and SARAH-style variance reduction achieve convergence guarantees and lower communication costs in federated learning under layer-wise smoothness.
RMNP preconditions matrix updates via row-wise L2 normalization instead of Newton-Schulz iteration, reducing complexity to O(mn) while matching Muon's non-convex convergence rate and empirical performance.
HTMuon modifies Muon to produce heavier-tailed updates and weight spectra via HT-SR theory, yielding up to 0.98 lower perplexity on LLaMA pretraining and serving as a plug-in for other Muon variants.
Proposes low-rank orthogonalization and derives low-rank Muon and MSGD variants that outperform standard Muon on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining while providing iteration complexity bounds.
citing papers explorer
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When and Why SignSGD Outperforms SGD: A Theoretical Study Based on $\ell_1$-norm Lower Bounds
SignSGD provably beats SGD by a factor of d under sparse noise via matched ℓ1-norm upper and lower bounds, with an equivalent result for Muon on matrices, and this predicts faster GPT-2 pretraining.
-
AMUSE: Anytime Muon with Stable Gradient Evaluation
AMUSE is a new optimizer integrating Muon orthogonalization with Schedule-Free averaging via adaptive interpolation for schedule-free anytime training that improves Pareto frontiers on vision and LLM tasks.
-
DP-Muon: Differentially Private Optimization via Matrix-Orthogonalized Momentum
DP-Muon adapts matrix-orthogonalized momentum optimization to differential privacy via per-matrix clipping and noise addition, with proofs of inherited privacy and optimization guarantees plus a bias-corrected version that improves private fine-tuning utility.
-
Gradient Clipping Beyond Vector Norms: A Spectral Approach for Matrix-Valued Parameters
Spectral clipping of leading singular values in gradient matrices stabilizes SGD for non-convex problems with heavy-tailed noise and achieves the optimal convergence rate O(K^{(2-2α)/(3α-2)}).
-
Phases of Muon: When Muon Eclipses SignSGD
On power-law covariance least squares problems, SignSVD (Muon) and SignSGD (Adam proxy) show three phases of relative performance depending on data exponent α and target exponent β.
-
Intrinsic Muon: Spectral Optimization on Riemannian Matrix Manifolds
Intrinsic Muon provides closed-form linear maximization oracles on multiple Riemannian matrix manifolds for unitarily invariant norms, with convergence rates depending only on manifold dimension or rank.
-
Muon with Nesterov Momentum: Heavy-Tailed Noise and (Randomized) Inexact Polar Decomposition
Muon with Nesterov momentum and inexact polar decomposition achieves optimal convergence rates of O(ε^(-(3α-2)/(α-1))) under heavy-tailed noise for ε-stationary points in non-convex settings.
-
Convergence Rate Analysis of SOAP with Arbitrary Orthogonal Projection Matrices
SOAP and its generalizations with arbitrary orthogonal projections converge at a provable rate when the projections are conditionally independent of the current gradient.
-
Sharp Capacity Scaling of Spectral Optimizers in Learning Associative Memory
Muon achieves higher storage capacity than SGD and matches Newton's method in one-step recovery rates for associative memory under power-law distributions, while saturating at larger critical batch sizes and showing faster initial multi-step dynamics.
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On the Convergence of Muon and Beyond
Muon-MVR2 attains the optimal anytime convergence rate of ~O(T^{-1/3}) in stochastic non-convex settings under horizon-free schedules.
-
LionMuon: Alternating Spectral and Sign Descent for Efficient Training
LionMuon alternates Lion sign steps and Muon spectral steps with shared dual-EMA momentum to match Lion memory while outperforming both at P=2 on 124M-720M models, backed by heavy-tailed complexity bounds that predict the optimal period.
-
Muon Does Not Converge on Convex Lipschitz Functions
Muon does not converge on convex Lipschitz functions regardless of learning rate, while error feedback restores theoretical convergence but degrades performance on CIFAR-10 and nanoGPT tasks.
-
Muon-OGD: Muon-based Spectral Orthogonal Gradient Projection for LLM Continual Learning
Muon-OGD introduces a spectral-norm constrained orthogonal projection method solved via dual iterations and Newton-Schulz approximations to improve stability-plasticity trade-off in sequential LLM adaptation.
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ZAYA1-8B Technical Report
ZAYA1-8B is a reasoning MoE model with 700M active parameters that matches larger models on math and coding benchmarks and reaches 91.9% on AIME'25 via Markovian RSA test-time compute.
-
SignMuon: Communication-Efficient Distributed Muon Optimization
SignMuon merges majority-vote sign aggregation from signSGD with Muon's polar-factor steps to create a communication-efficient distributed optimizer that matches signSGD rates under symmetric noise and shows strong empirical results on CIFAR and nanoGPT.
-
SUDA-Muon: Structural Design Principles and Boundaries for Fully Decentralized Muon
SUDA-Muon modularizes decentralized Muon via the SUDA template, proving a topology-separated convergence rate of O((1+σ/√N)K^{-1/4}) in nuclear-norm geometry while establishing that tracking-before-polarization is required to avoid non-stationary fixed points and that local-polarize-then-average is
-
MuonEq: Balancing Before Orthogonalization with Lightweight Equilibration
MuonEq introduces pre-orthogonalization equilibration schemes that improve Muon optimizer performance during large language model pretraining.
-
Anytime Training with Schedule-Free Spectral Optimization
SF-NorMuon is a new schedule-free spectral optimizer that closes the gap with tuned AdamW on 125M-772M parameter models across 1-8x Chinchilla horizons while providing stationarity guarantees.
-
MiMuon: Mixed Muon Optimizer with Improved Generalization for Large Models
MiMuon is a hybrid optimizer that achieves a generalization error bound of O(1/N) independent of the small singular-value gap that limits the original Muon bound, while retaining the same O(1/T^{1/4}) convergence rate.
-
Position: Zeroth-Order Optimization in Deep Learning Is Underexplored, Not Underpowered
Zeroth-order optimization is underexplored rather than underpowered in deep learning, with limitations stemming from full-space designs that can be addressed via subspace, spectral, and systems-aware approaches.
-
Communication-Efficient Gluon in Federated Learning
Compressed Gluon variants using unbiased/contraction compressors and SARAH-style variance reduction achieve convergence guarantees and lower communication costs in federated learning under layer-wise smoothness.
-
RMNP: Row-Momentum Normalized Preconditioning for Scalable Matrix-Based Optimization
RMNP preconditions matrix updates via row-wise L2 normalization instead of Newton-Schulz iteration, reducing complexity to O(mn) while matching Muon's non-convex convergence rate and empirical performance.
-
HTMuon: Improving Muon via Heavy-Tailed Spectral Correction
HTMuon modifies Muon to produce heavier-tailed updates and weight spectra via HT-SR theory, yielding up to 0.98 lower perplexity on LLaMA pretraining and serving as a plug-in for other Muon variants.
-
Low-rank Orthogonalization for Large-scale Matrix Optimization with Applications to Foundation Model Training
Proposes low-rank orthogonalization and derives low-rank Muon and MSGD variants that outperform standard Muon on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining while providing iteration complexity bounds.
- Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers