Periodic Row-wise Muon is introduced, which performs a full NS5 spectral update once every \(K\) steps and applies a low compute and communication cost row-wise constrained update based on the current momentum at the remaining steps to preserve Muon's generative quality advantage while translating it into end-to-end training efficiency for large DiTs.
Abstract
The matrix-aware optimizer Muon improves large model training by balancing updates across singular directions, yet its scaling behavior and end-to-end efficiency on large Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remain unclear. We first establish Muon's scaling behavior on DiTs from 1.3B to 15B parameters, showing that its optimization and generative quality advantages over AdamW persist across model scales. However, at scale, the 5-step Newton--Schulz iteration (NS5) performed at every optimization step, together with full-momentum materialization, introduces substantial computation and communication overhead that can offset Muon's step-efficiency advantage. We introduce \emph{Periodic Row-wise Muon}, which performs a full NS5 spectral update once every \(K\) steps and applies a low compute and communication cost row-wise constrained update based on the current momentum at the remaining steps. We further co-design a distributed implementation that operates directly on sharded momentum during non-refresh steps and accelerates spectral refreshes through bucketed all-gather and communication--computation overlap. Across all scales, Muon improves the best observed generative quality over AdamW by 12.9--19.1\%. Compared with vanilla Muon, Periodic Row-wise Muon remains within 0.5\% in best generative quality on the 1.3B--4B models and improves it by 4.5\% at 9B. It reduces optimizer time by 46.9--54.3\%, end-to-end step time by 15.7--24.3\%, and logical communication volume by 66.7\%, while reaching its respective best generative quality with 33.7--64.8\% less active training time. These results show that Periodic Row-wise Muon preserves Muon's generative quality advantage while translating it into end-to-end training efficiency for large DiTs.
Spectral-Aware Muon is introduced, which holds the head at the Muon scale and amplifies the bulk using a static spectral prior, and both variants outperform tuned AdamW and Muon (Scion implementation) baselines in all evaluated model-scale and batch-size configurations.
Xiaodong Wu, Wenyi Yu, Chao Zhang et al.· 0 citations
Chunked Muon (CMuon) is introduced, a simple yet highly effective strategy that partitions these matrices into independent sub-components prior to orthogonalization, effectively overcoming the late-stage convergence plateaus of vanilla Muon.
The Muon optimizer incurs a significant overhead cost due to its cubic-time Newton-Schulz orthogonalization step. When weights are sharded, communication overhead compounds this computational cost, eroding the benefits of Muon in many settings. We present Dion3, a revision of Muon that targets this overhead at every level of the stack. Our Gram Newton-Schulz algorithm reduces the FLOP cost of orthogonalization, our CuteDSL kernels accelerate it by exploiting symmetry, and our megabatching strategy reduces communication overhead. Moreover, we propose a simple change to the update rule that cuts costs even further: selecting only a fraction of the momentum matrix's rows to orthogonalize at each step. This update rule improves on Dion (another"compressed"version of Muon), in both speed and performance. Overall, Dion3 matches or improves on the loss achieved by Muon but reduces optimizer step time by up to 6x. Dion3 is available via the dion package (https://github.com/microsoft/dion) as a drop-in replacement for Muon.
Noah Amsel, Jack Zhang, Kwangjun Ahn et al.· 0 citations
It is found that Muon does not consistently outperform AdamW in this setting and that several previously reported advantages are sensitive to hyperparameter choices, providing a more nuanced picture of when spectrum-aware orthogonalization is beneficial and arguing for evaluating modern optimizers on controlled problems in addition to end-to-end benchmarks.
Alipanah Parviz, Gal Mishne, Alex Cloninger· 0 citations
Matrix optimizers such as Muon are attractive for large-scale training because they can improve convergence and token efficiency over coordinate-wise optimizers. Muon does this by orthogonalizing momentum-smoothed matrix updates with Newton-Schulz, producing spectrum-balanced updates that require the complete 2D matrix as input. This exposes a systems mismatch: FSDP/ZeRO-3 saves memory by making the optimizer see shards, not whole matrices. Existing systems therefore either reconstruct matrices at every optimizer step, paying weight-sized communication after backward, or make the update local by using ZeRO-1 owner placement with full parameters resident. MatrixFSDP takes a third path: it changes where ZeRO-3 shards live, not the optimizer being computed. For each 2D weight, one data-parallel rank owns the whole matrix and the other ranks hold empty shards; non-matrix tensors are packed into tail owners and stay on AdamW. The ordinary backward reduction then lands the full Muon input on the owner, so Newton-Schulz runs locally with no optimizer-step matrix collective. Forward and backward still materialize and reshard parameters; the runtime challenge is to make that uneven layout efficient and correct. MatrixFSDP does so with MatrixShard metadata, a balance-aware owner planner, deterministic owner-segment P2P collectives, owner-buffer pinning, and owner-shard checkpoint resharding. The resulting update matches full-matrix Muon while preserving ZeRO-3-scale memory: on 64 A100s, MatrixFSDP reduces optimizer-step latency over stock FSDP2-Muon by 4.2x on one node and 54.6x on eight nodes, reaches up to 2.15x end-to-end speedup, and runs model sizes where ZeRO-1 owner placement exceeds an 80 GB GPU.
PoLoRA is introduced, a Preconditioned Orthogonalized LoRA optimizer built from three ingredients: a product-aware spectral update direction, curvature preconditioning derived from controlling the per-sample loss change, and a magnitude rule that controls the sizes of both the factor and merged updates.
Nikhil Ghosh, Tetiana Parshakova, Robert M. Gower· 1 citation