Non-Record: Polar Express Muon negative result (1.0805 BPB, +0.0004 vs standard NS5)#1516
Open
dexhunter wants to merge 1 commit intoopenai:mainfrom
Open
Non-Record: Polar Express Muon negative result (1.0805 BPB, +0.0004 vs standard NS5)#1516dexhunter wants to merge 1 commit intoopenai:mainfrom
dexhunter wants to merge 1 commit intoopenai:mainfrom
Conversation
…pb 1.08049 Non-record submission documenting a negative result for Polar Express Muon, an alternative Newton-Schulz orthogonalization variant. Result: val_bpb 1.08049 (+0.00043 worse than standard Muon NS5 at 1.08006 on the same stack). The standard NS iteration is already near-optimal for this architecture at this step count. Single seed (s42), 15.998 MB, 588s train, legal score-first TTT. Credits: @clarkkev (PR openai#1394 baseline).
This file contains hidden or bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
1 participant
Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed.Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes.Only one suggestion per line can be applied in a batch.Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit.Applying suggestions on deleted lines is not supported.You must change the existing code in this line in order to create a valid suggestion.Outdated suggestions cannot be applied.This suggestion has been applied or marked resolved.Suggestions cannot be applied from pending reviews.Suggestions cannot be applied on multi-line comments.Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is queued to merge.Suggestion cannot be applied right now. Please check back later.
Non-Record Submission: Polar Express Muon (Negative Result)
val_bpb: 1.08049 (single seed s42) | 16.00 MB | 8×H100 SXM
This is a non-record submission documenting a negative result for Polar Express Muon, an alternative Newton-Schulz orthogonalization variant in the Muon optimizer.
What is Polar Express Muon?
Standard Muon uses a 5-step Newton-Schulz iteration to approximate the matrix polar decomposition for preconditioning. Polar Express replaces this with an alternative spectral approximation that has different convergence properties.
Result
Polar Express is slightly worse (+0.00043 BPB) than standard NS5 on this stack. The standard Newton-Schulz iteration is already near-optimal for this architecture at ~4900 steps.
Why this is interesting
Credits
Base stack: @clarkkev PR #1394.
Test plan