Muon Optimizes Under Spectral Norm Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Lizhang, Li, Jonathan, Liu, Qiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Lizhang
Li, Jonathan
Liu, Qiang
author_facet Chen, Lizhang
Li, Jonathan
Liu, Qiang
contents The pursuit of faster optimization algorithms remains an active and important research direction in deep learning. Recently, the Muon optimizer [JJB+24] has demonstrated promising empirical performance, but its theoretical foundation remains less understood. In this paper, we bridge this gap and provide a theoretical analysis of Muon by placing it within the Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ family of optimizers [CLLL24]. Specifically, we show that Muon corresponds to Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ when equipped with the nuclear norm, and we leverage the theoretical results of Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ to establish that Muon (with decoupled weight decay) implicitly solves an optimization problem that enforces a constraint on the spectral norm of weight matrices. This perspective not only demystifies the implicit regularization effects of Muon but also leads to natural generalizations through varying the choice of convex map $\mathcal{K}$, allowing for the exploration of a broader class of implicitly regularized and constrained optimization algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_15054
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Muon Optimizes Under Spectral Norm Constraints
Chen, Lizhang
Li, Jonathan
Liu, Qiang
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
The pursuit of faster optimization algorithms remains an active and important research direction in deep learning. Recently, the Muon optimizer [JJB+24] has demonstrated promising empirical performance, but its theoretical foundation remains less understood. In this paper, we bridge this gap and provide a theoretical analysis of Muon by placing it within the Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ family of optimizers [CLLL24]. Specifically, we show that Muon corresponds to Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ when equipped with the nuclear norm, and we leverage the theoretical results of Lion-$\mathcal{K}$ to establish that Muon (with decoupled weight decay) implicitly solves an optimization problem that enforces a constraint on the spectral norm of weight matrices. This perspective not only demystifies the implicit regularization effects of Muon but also leads to natural generalizations through varying the choice of convex map $\mathcal{K}$, allowing for the exploration of a broader class of implicitly regularized and constrained optimization algorithms.
title Muon Optimizes Under Spectral Norm Constraints
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.15054