RMNP: Row-Momentum Normalized Preconditioning for Scalable Matrix-Based Optimization
This work addresses computational bottlenecks in adaptive optimization methods for deep learning, offering a more efficient alternative to existing preconditioners like Muon, though it is incremental in nature.
The paper tackles the challenge of balancing preconditioning effectiveness with computational efficiency in training deep neural networks by introducing RMNP, an optimizer that replaces Newton-Schulz iteration with row-wise normalization, reducing per-iteration complexity from O(mn·min(m,n)) to O(mn) while maintaining competitive performance in large language model pretraining.
Preconditioned adaptive methods have gained significant attention for training deep neural networks, as they capture rich curvature information of the loss landscape . The central challenge in this field lies in balancing preconditioning effectiveness with computational efficiency of implementing the preconditioner. Among recent advances, \textsc{Muon} stands out by using Newton-Schulz iteration to obtain preconditioned updates without explicitly constructing the preconditioning matrix. Despite its advantages, the efficiency of \textsc{Muon} still leaves room for further improvement. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{RMNP} (Row Momentum Normalized Preconditioning), an optimizer that replaces Newton-Schulz iteration with a simple row-wise $\ell_2$ normalization operation, motivated by the empirically observed diagonal block structure of the Transformer layerwise Hessian. This substitution reduces the per-iteration computational complexity from $\mathcal{O}(mn\cdot\min(m,n))$ to $\mathcal{O}(mn)$ for an $m\times n$ weight matrix while maintaining comparable optimization performance. Theoretically, we establish convergence guarantees for \textsc{RMNP} in the non-convex setting that match recent results for \textsc{Muon} optimizers, achieving the information-theoretic minimax optimal complexity. Extensive experiments on large language model pretraining show that \textsc{RMNP} delivers competitive optimization performance compared with \textsc{Muon} while substantially reducing preconditioning wall-clock time. Our code is available at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RMNP-E8E1/}{this link}.