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Main Authors: Liu, Jingyuan, Su, Jianlin, Yao, Xingcheng, Jiang, Zhejun, Lai, Guokun, Du, Yulun, Qin, Yidao, Xu, Weixin, Lu, Enzhe, Yan, Junjie, Chen, Yanru, Zheng, Huabin, Liu, Yibo, Liu, Shaowei, Yin, Bohong, He, Weiran, Zhu, Han, Wang, Yuzhi, Wang, Jianzhou, Dong, Mengnan, Zhang, Zheng, Kang, Yongsheng, Zhang, Hao, Xu, Xinran, Zhang, Yutao, Wu, Yuxin, Zhou, Xinyu, Yang, Zhilin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16982
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author Liu, Jingyuan
Su, Jianlin
Yao, Xingcheng
Jiang, Zhejun
Lai, Guokun
Du, Yulun
Qin, Yidao
Xu, Weixin
Lu, Enzhe
Yan, Junjie
Chen, Yanru
Zheng, Huabin
Liu, Yibo
Liu, Shaowei
Yin, Bohong
He, Weiran
Zhu, Han
Wang, Yuzhi
Wang, Jianzhou
Dong, Mengnan
Zhang, Zheng
Kang, Yongsheng
Zhang, Hao
Xu, Xinran
Zhang, Yutao
Wu, Yuxin
Zhou, Xinyu
Yang, Zhilin
author_facet Liu, Jingyuan
Su, Jianlin
Yao, Xingcheng
Jiang, Zhejun
Lai, Guokun
Du, Yulun
Qin, Yidao
Xu, Weixin
Lu, Enzhe
Yan, Junjie
Chen, Yanru
Zheng, Huabin
Liu, Yibo
Liu, Shaowei
Yin, Bohong
He, Weiran
Zhu, Han
Wang, Yuzhi
Wang, Jianzhou
Dong, Mengnan
Zhang, Zheng
Kang, Yongsheng
Zhang, Hao
Xu, Xinran
Zhang, Yutao
Wu, Yuxin
Zhou, Xinyu
Yang, Zhilin
contents Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling up Muon: (1) adding weight decay and (2) carefully adjusting the per-parameter update scale. These techniques allow Muon to work out-of-the-box on large-scale training without the need of hyper-parameter tuning. Scaling law experiments indicate that Muon achieves $\sim\!2\times$ computational efficiency compared to AdamW with compute optimal training. Based on these improvements, we introduce Moonlight, a 3B/16B-parameter Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) model trained with 5.7T tokens using Muon. Our model improves the current Pareto frontier, achieving better performance with much fewer training FLOPs compared to prior models. We open-source our distributed Muon implementation that is memory optimal and communication efficient. We also release the pretrained, instruction-tuned, and intermediate checkpoints to support future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16982
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Muon is Scalable for LLM Training
Liu, Jingyuan
Su, Jianlin
Yao, Xingcheng
Jiang, Zhejun
Lai, Guokun
Du, Yulun
Qin, Yidao
Xu, Weixin
Lu, Enzhe
Yan, Junjie
Chen, Yanru
Zheng, Huabin
Liu, Yibo
Liu, Shaowei
Yin, Bohong
He, Weiran
Zhu, Han
Wang, Yuzhi
Wang, Jianzhou
Dong, Mengnan
Zhang, Zheng
Kang, Yongsheng
Zhang, Hao
Xu, Xinran
Zhang, Yutao
Wu, Yuxin
Zhou, Xinyu
Yang, Zhilin
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling up Muon: (1) adding weight decay and (2) carefully adjusting the per-parameter update scale. These techniques allow Muon to work out-of-the-box on large-scale training without the need of hyper-parameter tuning. Scaling law experiments indicate that Muon achieves $\sim\!2\times$ computational efficiency compared to AdamW with compute optimal training. Based on these improvements, we introduce Moonlight, a 3B/16B-parameter Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) model trained with 5.7T tokens using Muon. Our model improves the current Pareto frontier, achieving better performance with much fewer training FLOPs compared to prior models. We open-source our distributed Muon implementation that is memory optimal and communication efficient. We also release the pretrained, instruction-tuned, and intermediate checkpoints to support future research.
title Muon is Scalable for LLM Training
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16982