Variance-Adaptive Muon: Accelerating LLM Pretraining with NSR-Modulated and Variance-Scaled Momentum

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14603v1
• Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2026 02:41:56 GMT
• Title: Variance-Adaptive Muon: Accelerating LLM Pretraining with NSR-Modulated and Variance-Scaled Momentum
• Authors: Jingru Li, Yibo Fan, Huan Li,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks.<n>We propose two variants of Muon, Muon-NSR and Muon-VS, which apply variance-adaptive normalization to momentum.<n>Experiments on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining demonstrate that our proposed methods accelerate convergence and consistently achieve lower validation loss than both competitive, well-tuned AdamW and Muon baselines.
• Score: 19.385264518362472
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet pretraining is computationally demanding, making optimizer efficiency an important practical consideration. Muon accelerates LLM pretraining via orthogonal momentum updates that serve as a matrix analogue of the element-wise sign operator. Motivated by the recent perspective that Adam is a variance-adaptive sign update algorithm, we propose two variants of Muon, Muon-NSR and Muon-VS, which apply variance-adaptive normalization to momentum before orthogonalization. Muon-NSR applies noise-to-signal ratio (NSR) modulation, while Muon-VS performs variance-based scaling without introducing additional hyperparameters. Experiments on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining demonstrate that our proposed methods accelerate convergence and consistently achieve lower validation loss than both competitive, well-tuned AdamW and Muon baselines. For example, on the LLaMA-1.2B model, Muon-NSR and Muon-VS reduce the iterations required to reach the target validation loss by $1.36\times$ relative to the well-tuned Muon following the recent benchmark.

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