arXiv:2608.04607math.OCcs.LG2026-08

提出改进版MUON优化器,解决其不收敛问题并给出误差分析

On MUON optimization: From non-convergence to an error analysis with Polar Express and the Newton-Schulz polynomial from implementations

  • 用任意高阶多项式替代原版MUON的固定五步牛顿-舒尔兹迭代
  • 证明在大多数小批量设置下原MUON无法收敛,但新方法可保证收敛
  • 适用于大规模语言模型训练,适合关注优化器稳定性的研究者

随机梯度下降(SGD)是深度神经网络训练的标准优化方法。在如大型语言模型等主流AI系统中,通常采用加速版SGD而非标准形式。其中,2024年Jordan等人提出的动量正交化牛顿-舒尔兹(MUON)优化器尤为流行。该方法利用权重参数的特殊矩阵结构,每轮迭代使用五个牛顿-舒尔兹(NS)矩阵步骤。本文提出并研究一种广义版本的MUON优化器,支持任意数量的广义NS步骤及任意高阶多项式。该方法涵盖原始MUON和近期提出的Polar Express方法作为特例。针对一类简单随机优化问题(SOP),我们证明:对几乎所有小批量大小,原版MUON在梯度步数趋于无穷时无法收敛至最优解。同时,我们建立了包含广义NS步骤的MUON误差分析,给出了基于梯度步数与小批量大小的收敛速率。通过二次型随机优化问题及带ℓ₂正则化的二分类逻辑回归等具体例子验证了理论结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods are the standard instruments for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs). In many relevant artificial intelligence (AI) systems - such as popular large language models (LLMs)-not the standard SGD scheme is used as the optimization method but instead suitable accelerated variants of SGD are employed. One of the most popular methods of such accelerated SGD variants is the momentum orthogonalized by Newton-Schulz (MUON) optimizer proposed by Jordan et al. in 2024. The MUON optimizer exploits the special matrix structure of the weight parameters in the training of the DNNs and, in its original form, employs five Newton-Schultz (NS) matrix steps in each MUON iteration. In this work we propose and study a generalized variant of the MUON optimizer involving an arbitrary number of generalized NS steps with polynomials of possibly arbitrary high degree. The considered optimizer covers MUON with the original NS polynomial as well as MUON combined with the recently proposed Polar Express method as special cases. For a simple class of stochastic optimization problems (SOPs) we show for almost every mini-batch size that MUON fails to converge to the solution of the SOP as the number of gradient steps converges to infinity. We also establish an error analysis for MUON with the generalized NS steps that provides convergence rates in terms of the number of gradient steps and in terms of the size of the mini-batch. We illustrate our general error analysis for MUON in the case of several concrete examples including quadratic stochastic optimization problems (SOPs) as well as $\ell_2$ regularized logistic regression for binary classification.

优化器收敛分析深度学习

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