Convergence Analysis of Muon-type Methods with Inexact LMO in the Degenerate Case

Muon-type methods have demonstrated potentially superior performance over Adam and its variants, and have shown hyperparameter transferability across model sizes when specific norms are chosen for the LMO in deep architectures. However, while the LMO is solved approximately via iterative algorithms in practice, most convergence analyses consider the ideal case where the search direction is the exact solution to the LMO. Recently, the inexact Muon update was analyzed by Shulgin et al. [2025], which reveals a fundamental coupling between the inexactness and the optimal step size and momentum. However, the convergence is guaranteed for the non-degenerate case only, i.e., the smallest positive singular value of the rescaled momentum is assumed to be bounded below by some positive constant when the spectral norm is used. In this work, we investigate Muon-type methods with inexact LMO in the degenerate case, where the smallest positive singular value of the rescaled momentum can approach zero, for the general non-convex case and the star-convex case with weight decay. Novel assumptions are proposed to address the challenges posed by inexact LMO in such degenerate scenarios, and convergence rates are established under the layer-wise (L0, L1)-smooth assumption for both cases.