Muon-C: Operator-Aligned Muon for Convolutional Kernels

Abstract:Muon replaces matrix momentum with an approximately orthogonal polar direction, but its geometry depends on the matrix representation. For convolution, standard unfolding describes a local patch map rather than the convolution operator. We introduce Muon-C, an operator-aligned optimizer that represents kernel momentum as frequency-wise channel-transfer matrices, polarizes these blocks independently, and uses a critical Fourier grid to return updates exactly to the original finite kernel support. We show that the new geometry arises from combining the block partition and Fourier coordinates. The exact-polar direction is a linear minimization oracle under the critically sampled convolution norm. Its worst-case guarantee relative to the continuous convolution-operator norm is never weaker than unfolding and is strictly stronger for $3\times3$ kernels. On CIFAR-10 flow matching with matched applied-update RMS, Muon-C reaches 9.87 FID at 40k iterations, compared with 22.26 for unfolded Muon and 51.31 for Adam. It reaches their final quality using $0.62\times$ and $0.64\times$ their model FLOPs, respectively. Under equal tuning budgets, Muon-C achieves 3.42 FID. Gains persist across data scales and transfer to classification across convolutional architectures.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Machine Learning (stat.ML)

arXiv:2609.09676 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2609.09676v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.09676 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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