Error Feedback for Muon and Friends

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission16605 Authors

Keywords: optimization, communication efficiency, compression, error feedback

Abstract: Recent optimizers like Muon, Scion, and Gluon have pushed the frontier of large-scale deep learning by exploiting layer-wise linear minimization oracles (LMOs) over non-Euclidean norm balls, capturing neural network structure in ways traditional algorithms cannot. Yet, no principled distributed framework exists for these methods, and communication bottlenecks remain unaddressed. The very few distributed variants are heuristic, with no convergence guarantees in sight. We introduce EF21-Muon, the first communication-efficient, non-Euclidean LMO-based optimizer with rigorous convergence guarantees. EF21-Muon supports stochastic gradients, momentum, and bidirectional compression with error feedback–marking the first extension of error feedback beyond the Euclidean setting. It recovers Muon/Scion when compression is off and specific norms are chosen, providing the first efficient distributed implementation of this powerful family. Our theory covers non-Euclidean smooth and the more general3 (L0, L1)–smooth setting, matching best-known Euclidean rates and enabling faster convergence under suitable norm choices. We further extend the analysis to layer-wise (generalized) smoothness regimes, capturing the anisotropic structure of deep networks. Experiments on NanoGPT benchmarking EF21-Muon against uncompressed Muon/Scion/Gluon demonstrate up to 7× communication savings with no accuracy degradation.

Primary Area: optimization

Submission Number: 16605