AdaGrad Meets Muon: Adaptive Stepsizes for Orthogonal Updates

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Minxin, Liu, Yuxuan, Schaeffer, Hayden
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Minxin
Liu, Yuxuan
Schaeffer, Hayden
author_facet Zhang, Minxin
Liu, Yuxuan
Schaeffer, Hayden
contents The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for such orthogonalized updates. AdaGrad, by contrast, is a widely used adaptive method that scales stochastic gradients by accumulated past gradients. We propose a new algorithm, AdaGO, which combines a norm-based AdaGrad-type stepsize with an orthogonalized update direction, bringing together the benefits of both approaches. Unlike other adaptive variants of Muon, AdaGO preserves the orthogonality of the update direction, which can be interpreted as a spectral descent direction, while adapting the stepsizes to the optimization landscape by scaling the direction with accumulated past gradient norms. The implementation of AdaGO requires only minimal modification to Muon, with a single additional scalar variable, the accumulated squared gradient norms, to be computed, making it computationally and memory efficient. Optimal theoretical convergence rates are established for nonconvex functions in both stochastic and deterministic settings under standard smoothness and unbiased bounded-variance noise assumptions. Empirical results on CIFAR-10 classification and function regression demonstrate that AdaGO outperforms Muon and Adam.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02981
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AdaGrad Meets Muon: Adaptive Stepsizes for Orthogonal Updates
Zhang, Minxin
Liu, Yuxuan
Schaeffer, Hayden
Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
The recently proposed Muon optimizer updates weight matrices via orthogonalized momentum and has demonstrated strong empirical success in large language model training. However, it remains unclear how to determine the learning rates for such orthogonalized updates. AdaGrad, by contrast, is a widely used adaptive method that scales stochastic gradients by accumulated past gradients. We propose a new algorithm, AdaGO, which combines a norm-based AdaGrad-type stepsize with an orthogonalized update direction, bringing together the benefits of both approaches. Unlike other adaptive variants of Muon, AdaGO preserves the orthogonality of the update direction, which can be interpreted as a spectral descent direction, while adapting the stepsizes to the optimization landscape by scaling the direction with accumulated past gradient norms. The implementation of AdaGO requires only minimal modification to Muon, with a single additional scalar variable, the accumulated squared gradient norms, to be computed, making it computationally and memory efficient. Optimal theoretical convergence rates are established for nonconvex functions in both stochastic and deterministic settings under standard smoothness and unbiased bounded-variance noise assumptions. Empirical results on CIFAR-10 classification and function regression demonstrate that AdaGO outperforms Muon and Adam.
title AdaGrad Meets Muon: Adaptive Stepsizes for Orthogonal Updates
topic Machine Learning
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02981